


Boats Against The Current

by shadow_in_the_shade



Category: Thor - All Media Types
Genre: 1920's AU, Consensual Non-Consent, Fitzgerald - Freeform, Gatsby AU, Green Light, Light BDSM, M/M, Sibling Incest, Underage Kissing, Underage Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-12-02
Packaged: 2018-02-06 02:59:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 23
Words: 43,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1841782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadow_in_the_shade/pseuds/shadow_in_the_shade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”</p><p>1920's Gatsby inspired AU. </p><p>As children, growing up on Long Island in the 1920's young Thor comes to base all his hope for the future on the green light that is Loki. Did he idealize the past? Was the perfection they had really what he thought it was? Was Loki who he thought he was? Can we in truth, repeat the past after all and should we if we can?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Boats Against The Current**

_“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther….and one fine morning –_

_And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”_

_F Scott Fitzgerald “The Great Gatsby”._

 

**1917**

There were so many different noises swirling up out of the lively night that the boy’s head chattered with it. He was trying to sleep; though neither very intently or effectively, and all of the muted outside and downstairs sounds were intriguing and annoying him beyond what his young mind could handle.

In the dark, lying awake in bed, his own breathing loud in the stifling heat of summer, it was hard to pull apart each sound and pinpoint where they came from around the house and grounds. The window open just a crack let in the faint sound of the sea. He had pulled the curtains back to silence their rustling and – more – to be able to see the stars from where he lay in bed. Loki said the stars kept him awake, that on clear nights he could hear them twinkling. Thor had told him how silly that was but it did not stop him lying in the dark and listening for them.

Not that he could have heard beyond the cry of the gulls across the bay and the chatter from below, plastic laughter sliding up from the side gardens, a tangy accompaniment to the clink of glasses and the bittersweet slink of background violins. These gatherings never sounded really real to him, rather like stories being played out while he tried to sleep; but he wanted to be a part of that glitter and glass all the same.

Sometimes he would try and pick out his parents voices from the general murmuring hubbub. His mother’s never came – too low and sweet to carry; sometimes his father’s would swell up through the floors, on a rise of manly debate or booming artificial laughter. Some of the guest’s voices he recognised as ones he heard before, some of them often, and he had come to nurture shoots of fondness or dislike for these faceless people based on nothing more than cadence.

The boy floated so weightlessly upon this clattering stream of sound that it was a splash in the dark to startle to hear the rustling so close outside his window, and to see the glass illuminated by a dull green light from outside. He sat up straight in bed, peering out in curiosity and alarm and nearly yelling for fear of ghosts when a pale face appeared outside the window with a torch clenched between its teeth, and a small insistent fist came rapping at the glass.

Thor got out of bed, not knowing whether to yell, groan or laugh and ultimately coming out with a sound that combined all three.

“Loki!” he hissed, throwing up the window – “What are you doing out there?”

His brother muttered something petulant and unintelligible around the torch in his teeth, swaying precariously on whatever foothold he had as the window was moved.

“What?” Thor took the torch out of Loki’s teeth and frowned at it – “Give me that!”

“I said let me in you fool – I’m hanging in the ivy!”

“Yes but –” Thor stood aside to give Loki room to scramble in – “ _Why_ are you hanging in the ivy?”

Loki hauled his small self up and tumbled onto the floor of Thor’s room, where he shook his head rapidly in relief at finding himself grounded, like a dog shaking water from its fur.

“It’s fun!”

“It’s dangerous!” Thor protested.

“You’re just saying that because you’re too big and scared to do it yourself!”

“I am _not_ too big -”

“Ha!”

“ _Or_ scared! I could too!”

“Way too big. You’d fall and die like an elephant in the ivy.”

“I would not!”

“Would too!” Loki stuck his tongue out and Thor ignored him, putting his head out the window to look at the now crushed ivy that crept up this wall of the house.

“Oh don’t try it now!” Loki whined – “Not when I’ve gone to the trouble –” Thor looked at him sharply as he broke off in a mumble and Loki looked down sulkily, picking ivy leaves out of his hair and clothes and dropping them on Thor’s previously immaculate floor.

“Hey!” he objected – “Stop that!” but the objection was half hearted in the pungent aroma of leaf and outdoors that now pervaded the bedroom and Loki’s eyes lit up in pleasure at his own naughtiness in a way even Thor found it hard to stay angry at for long. Loki’s face, changeable in its expression as the shimmer of light on the water, broke into a grin and he suddenly dived like a fish for Thor’s bed, burrowing himself under the sheets and chuckling.

“Loki –” Thor groaned, wearily used to his brother’s pranks by now – “What are you doing?”

“Hiding!” came the muffled chirp – “In case mother and father come up and send me back to bed!”

“Is that why –” Thor broke off – it was too strange, holding a conversation with a lump in the bed sheets. He sighed and burrowed his way into the little cotton cave along with Loki – “Is that why you came through the ivy – so they didn’t see you?”

Loki nodded; Thor could feel it in the dark.

“There are people outside you know. They’d have thought you were a burglar!”

“They were only out the front!”

“- or a monkey! Loki, get out of my bed!”

“You won’t always say that.”

“Huh?”

Loki took his torch back out of Thor’s fingers and Thor saw him blink as though spooked as the strange green glow illumined their den.

“I dunno,” Loki shrugged – “Sometimes I say stuff and I don’t know where it comes from but – but it always turns out to be right – I dunno –” Loki’s forehead knitted in perplexity and the contemplation of his own strange brain and Thor could not help but laugh at him;

“You’re weird.”

“You’re an oaf.”

“You’re such a little pest, Loki”

“Well – you smell!”

Thor pushed Loki and they tussled in the sheets so ineffectually that they both laughed.

“Go away then!” Thor repeated benignly.

“Don’t wanna. Thor is it true the whole world is at war?”

_Oh,_ Thor thought, knowing from the very sudden extreme lightness of Loki’s tone and the carefully off – handed way he said it that this has been bothering him a great deal more than he would let on.

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Father was talking with some men downstairs the other day. I was spying. Is it true?”

“I think so.”

“Will we be okay?”

“Of course,” Thor said, with more conviction than he felt, flashing Loki a reassuring smile, the existence of which is actually enough to smooth out the worry lines in that earnest little face, green in the torch light like some kind of goblin.

“What did you even do to that?” he indicated the torch Loki was holding under his chin to make faces with. He could not help but giggle even though it was silly – but Loki always did manage to make him laugh like an idiot.

“Good isn’t it?” Loki grinned – “I thought – I need a torch to go climbing in the ivy but it was too bright and people might see me – I so I coloured over it and I like green and also this way you’ll see my light and know that it’s me and not something creepy.”

“Pah!” Thor snorts – “You’re the creepiest something of all – hey wait – you’re gonna do this again? Who says?”

“Well I do. I don’t like it when there’s all these people in the house. This way any time I can’t sleep I can come and sleep with you and –” _and our parents won’t care._ He does not say this but Thor hears it all the same, and cannot help but understand. And then there is the way Loki is smiling at him so winningly, that smile that knows it will get what it wants. Thor takes hold of Loki’s arm in what he means as manly solidarity but ends up in more of a stroke.

“Don’t worry Loki, when I’m grown up we’ll have much better parties than they do.”

“Just for us?”

“Just for us if you like – but maybe – maybe we can make it look like there’s other people there.”

“Like magic?” Loki’s eyes sparkled.

“Yeah,” Thor yawned and stretched, coming back up out from under the covers and lying curled facing Loki who turned off his torch and yawned back, also resurfacing from the river of sheets like a diver into the light that was really darkness, but after all seemed lighter to Thor now that he was no longer lying alone listening to the sounds that made him feel so strange and unreal.

“Sleepy,” Loki announced, yawning again like a cat.

“Oh, you’re sleepy now?”

“Yeah – cause I’m with you.”

“Oh thanks.”

Loki chuckled and rolled over, able to say – when it is into the dark and Thor cannot see his face –

“I’m safe when I’m with you.”

It came out as more of a question than exactly a statement, but it surprised Thor to hear it all the same;

“Yeah” he said softly – “You’re safe with me little brother, I’ll never let anything hurt you.”

Loki smiled widely into the night and Thor, tingling in a perplexity of tender protectiveness, threw a small bear – like arm around over to hug him close.

“Urgh Thor – get off me – too hefty!” Loki whined, struggling – desperate for it to be ineffectual. It was, and Thor kissed his soft tangled head into the bargain.

“Eww, gross!” Loki grumbled, but he giggled as he grumbled and was very soon asleep.

Thor lay awake only a little longer, not caring about the noises downstairs now that he could hear Loki’s snuffly animal breathing so close in the soft dark, less warm and itchy with Loki’s curiously cool softness beside him. He laughed to himself silently at Loki’s silliness while secretly more glad to have him here than he would ever have liked to say. The chatter from below that had so filled his head gave way to the warm breath of this curious small creature, the steady rhythmic heave and sigh of him. Outside the gulls cry too gave way to the steady in and out, draw and crash of the waves. He fell asleep with the idea of Loki’s funny green light glowing behind his eyelids, imprinting itself into the current of his mind.

__x__

 

**I will never be able to write like Fitzgerald, but that’s okay I think – I figure I can still be inspired by his genius – hence on the back of “Shadow in the Sun I was seeking an exciting new AU and 1920’s Gatsby style hit me as a plan. I know this chapter is set in 1917 but in the next chapter I promise 1920’s it will be! Please let me know your thoughts on this – I’m always nervous about new AUs!**


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

 

**July 1922**

 

The world was hurtling at a break-neck speed, clattering like the rattle of cars across the bridge from the city. The stench of oil and ash never crossed over to the glacial cool of the West Egg mansions, and the weeds that sprung up in all those acres of glistening lawn rolling down to the sea were swiftly clipped back into neatness no matter how hard the boys tried to nurture them. To nurture chaos hiding under the gleaming mask of society. The sedate drawing-room-ripple of polite orchestral notes gave way to the dirty slur and heady whisper of jazz, sensual saxophone pulsing a come-to-bed beat across the sound to rival the waves on the shore.

In all this rush and hurry, nobody had time to notice two boys alternately racing towards adulthood and fighting to beat off the inevitable growing up process for as long as they could. Thor noticed Loki and Loki’s disconcertingly watchful eyes were rarely far from Thor’s in those days, and this had to suffice for both of them when nobody else who came out to the island had time to notice the children fighting for a place in their world, even their time and their home – that rambling, dazzling mess of a mansion.

Side by side they grew, on paths that constantly intertwined and yet branched off in some inexplicably different directions. Thor was drawn to the cut glass and crystal, the conversation and the bubble of interaction personified in the glint of a fizzing champagne glass. Prohibition had done its work- if its work had been to keep the drink flowing and the people dancing, and with it came the lure of heady, forbidden delight that provoked the boy to do all he could to be seen by all, to step into that light from a thousand torches and the swinging rainbow dazzle of chandeliers.

Loki, for his part, swore he would never understand the fascination; not even grown yet, he was already coming to realise painfully that there were temptations in this world far more forbidden-and consequently alluring-than all the prohibition could ban. His preference, if he did come close to the people and the lights, was to watch from the shadows, the seeing unseen, within and without as he tried to explain to Thor one day.

“You can’t be both,” Thor had replied.

Thor would never understand, Loki feared, any duality of mind, personality or state of being; and they argued constantly as to whether it would be better to be without or within that hallowed circle of glittering people and dazzling entertainments. In this they formed a perfect circle of two, bound together in disagreement, conflict, passionate reconciliation and happiness with each other, more intense than it should have been for their having little other outlet for emotion or connection. Happiness, they found, always had a time limit on it, ever fading back into disagreement before it had been long enough. And so it repeated, sometimes over a course of weeks, sometimes days, sometimes hours. Thus they learned early that their lives were to be dances in circles.

This first circle, of minor conflict and reconciliation of interest came to a head on the night of Sif Buchanan’s coming out party. It was the first party Thor had been officially invited to and, never prone to subtlety, he could not contain his excitement. In direct opposition was Loki, who had not been invited, for Thor at fifteen was only just tentatively being considered old enough. Loki, two years younger, had not stood a chance, even if Sif had liked him. From the moment the invitation had arrived, Loki had gone about quietly seething and then, as the day of the debutante ball grew nearer – not so quietly. To everyone else, the cause of his irritation, nay outright anger appeared to be that he could not understand why Thor would _want_ to attend such a “tedious and nauseating spectacle” whilst only Thor guessed at the truth of it and even he missed the mark just a little.

The night of the party came, and as Thor tried to dress like a gentleman, Loki sat on the floor throwing bitter jibe after bitter jibe at him. Finally, after Loki had heckled him one too many times about how little he would enjoy it he rounded on him and came out with it –

“You’re jealous aren’t you?”

Loki laughed nastily, a little more afraid that Thor had guessed at the truth than he had cause to be. It was the most artificial sound Thor had ever heard him make.

“Oh please –”

“You are! You’re going on like this because I’m going and you’re not!”

“Oh, like hell I’d want –”

“You do so! – and don’t swear!”

“Yes, because you set such a shining example! I tell you I couldn’t give a damn if you go to this stupid party or not.”

“Liar!” Loki smirked and shrugged at that as if to say, quite clearly – _get used to it –_ “And I _am_ going, whatever you say!”

“She doesn’t fancy you back you know,” Loki snapped in quickly on this new tack – “She wouldn’t.  You’re younger than her by _loads.”_

He folded his arms and looked smug at this and if he had not been so surprised by the sudden turn in Loki’s attack, Thor would very much have wanted to punch him.

“Only by three years – and anyway what? I don’t fancy Sif – why would I care if –”

“You do too!”

“No – I really don’t –”

“Hmm –” Loki frowned at Thor thoughtfully, so adept at dishonesty himself he has become very good at reading and even appreciating honesty in other people. And it occurs to him that Thor really _does not_ fancy Sif as much as he had assumed. He was quietly angry at the amount of time he had wasted agonising over this issue.

“You don’t?”

“No! Anyway what has _that_ to do with –” a look of understanding comes across Thor’s face that is so near and yet so far off the mark that Loki wants to laugh when he frowns and asks –

“Do _you_ fancy Sif?”

Loki _does_ laugh a little, at how wrong Thor can be and how epically he, who has got so much closer to the root of it than anyone else, has misplaced the cause of Loki’s jealousy. Thor took it as the negative it after all certainly was and went back to the fight he had got into with his bow tie.

“Help me with this will you, old sport?”

“Ugh,” Loki got to his feet, his actions, as so often, belying his words – “Not if you use that insufferable phrase I won’t.”

“I got it –” Thor began, affronted;

“From Volstagg I know.” Loki rolled his eyes, whilst Thor moved his head from side to side to let Loki’s nimble fingers rectify the many problems he was having with his collar – “It’s not you, brother, get a new phrase.”

“Shut up Loki. Now how do I look?”

Loki arched his eyebrows at Thor’s preening in the mirror whilst he tried to pose like an adult. When he eventually dropped it and turned to Loki with genuine concern in his eyes, it was Loki’s eyes that clouded over –

“Really though – how do I look”. Loki sighed deeply inside at that warm nervousness in his brother’s voice, privileged in his knowledge that it was a childish tone only he ever got to hear.

“Beautiful,” he replied softly and for once honestly, wishing he could have kept the word less emotional or been able to wrench up some lie or insult as he usually managed. But Thor turned to him smiling so goldenly that he couldn’t bring himself to unsay it, even though the hug Thor gave him was so quick and brotherly that Loki felt despair all the way down to his toes.

“I won’t be back late,” Thor smiled on his way out the door – “I’ll tell you all about it”. Thankfully he was gone too quickly to hear Loki mutter –

“Won’t that be fun,” as he kicked Thor’s wall in frustration.

__x__

All that evening Loki watched the lights at the Buchanan place from his boat out on the waters. He was becoming used nowadays to sailing a little ways out from the shore with only his weird green light to see by and watching the colour and play of lights in the large houses from this safe and detached distance. From here he could hear the tinkle of glass and laughter, both as insubstantial as each other, could see the lights where they blazed from the windows or shivered like magic in the trees and strung across the lawns. The light stretched out into the dark waters, apparitions in the ripples, and he kept his boat resting just beyond them, close enough to touch but never letting them fall on him. He imagined Thor being there beside him and how he would whisper to him – _see, it’s simple, this here is within and without_ and Thor understanding and smiling at Loki for his cleverness and depth. He would see that depth and a beauty in Loki that went beyond any of the razzle dazzle of the society he craved and when he turned to him to smile that golden smile that in truth he did keep for Loki alone it would finally go further than just a smile –

Loki cursed himself that he continued to torment himself with these childish imaginings that, if they ever became other than such would be dangerous beyond the consumption of bootlegged alcohol.

He watched the tiny people on the dark lawns and felt infinitely superior to all of them, amusing himself arrogantly trying to pick out individuals and wondering if there was any such thing in all this mass of humanity. He lay back in his boat and enjoyed the swell of distant jazz rippling out to him over the water. He watched until he became too sleepy and turned his boat back towards their house. Never admitting that there was any element of missing him in the action, he made his secretive way to Thor’s room and curled up in his bed. He was half asleep, dozing strangely by the time Thor came in, not altogether that much later, singing to himself quietly as he undressed in the dark, not noticing Loki peeping at him, barely daring to breathe until he climbed into bed and yelled to find him there, leaping straight out of bed and putting some semblance of nightwear on.

“Good party?” Loki grinned, voice bubbly as Thor’s first taste of champagne.

“Loki!” Thor yelled, not as horrified as he would have liked to be and behaving more so than he was to cover it up – “What are you doing in my bed?”

“Well – I _was_ sleeping – before you so rudely interrupted –”

“Yes, I so rudely got into my own bed. How dare I?” but Thor was already getting back into bed as he said it. Loki rolled over so they were face to face on the pillow –

“So. Good party.”

“It was okay. Sif was annoying.”

“Was she pretty?”

Thor shrugged;

“Silvery. Not that pretty. I did try champagne though.”

“What’s it like?”

“Funny. Bubbly. I don’t know.”

“I wish I could try.”

“Next time I’ll tell them I won’t go without you. It wasn’t so much fun.”

“Told you.”

“I hate you Loki.”

“Hate you,” Loki echoed back, smiling right down to his toes at Thor’s words as much as at his inability to have fun without him and, not quite intentionally, inching a little closer in the bed until their foreheads were touching and he could feel Thor’s breath on his lips, even smell the curious tang of the wine.

“Thor –” Loki whispered, not knowing what to say in the sudden realisation of how the slight space between them crackled, dangerous electricity spitting from a shaky bulb.

“Loki –” Thor suspected he was not thinking straight; that he was heady from champagne and that this, combined with Loki’s breath feeling nice upon his skin was all it took to make him do what he did. Ever after they could not have agreed on who moved close, but suddenly, their breath against one another’s faces and the warm and tingling dark and their lips touching like a whisper, breaking into a clumsy kiss and Loki, uncertain now if this time it was real or just another dream come true. But his dreams were never this awkward, this unsure, this delicious, their tongues never so uncertainly, tentatively probing and that taste of wine that he had never been able to imagine. Near silence in the darkness, just a pair of nervous hearts hammering against propriety, Loki’s eyes wide open all the while in disbelief and the passionate wish for this never to end, his young chest heaving as Thor’s hands reached for him, twisting around him and he in turn clutching back, trembling and needy, every grain of his body tingling. Thor no different, only pulling back, panting and afraid at the powerful feel of a more adult lust pressing against Loki’s own, eyes wide and confused, Loki pulling back at the same time, thunderstruck, almost paralysed in not knowing whether to smile, or panic, stay or run.

This time he runs.

__x__

 

**Very pleased with this chapter; it was gonna contain a lot more stuff happening but it got long so I’ll do that next chapter! I sort of think I write best when inspired by something which I figure means I really am a shadow-in-the-shade as my tumblr url would suggest, a mere reflection of another person’s greatness. But I guess I don’t mind that too much, reflections are pretty things too! Feeling very Loki all of a sudden!**

**(And yes you will get a much clearer picture of flappergirl!Sif cause I can picture her _completely_ in my head!)**


	3. Chapter 3

  **3.**

The sun streaming in through Thor’s window is a ghastly accompaniment to the first hangover of his young life. It is the first time the brightness has ever been unpleasant to him. He had heard people talk and even laugh about their hangovers as though it was something terribly adult and cool – something he had even thought he wanted to experience. It was not.

He groaned to himself, struggling to sit up and not just flop back wearily into his sheets. He heard in a swirl through his fogged up head all those snatches of chatter, all those laughingly groaned _never agains_ and _god, what did I do?_ All the forced and not so forced horror at what might have occurred the night before, the awkward show of amusement and faux camaraderie.

He remembered with a sudden lurch what _he_ did the night before and there was instantly no room in his head for anything else. He wished he could think all those cliché’s he had heard so often – all of the _god how could I what was I thinking, Jesus how drunk was I? We’ll laugh this off, but god what do I do until then?_ But he can’t. He forces them all into his head in quick succession but not a word of it rings with any truth at all. They will _not_ laugh this off and he was _not_ that drunk. Worse though it is than try and hide behind these thoughts, he is forced to admit that he knew exactly what he was doing when he kissed his little brother like that. Any other thoughts were both dishonest to himself and horribly unfair to Loki. The truth was that the only thing he could pin on the alcohol was that it had given him the courage to do what all his instincts had been urging him to do for some time now.

The more important questions came now to press against his tender brain like unwelcome but persistent guests. What did it mean? Was it alright or allowed to do this? To want this? What would he say to Loki? And what – above all he remembered Loki’s wide, frightened eyes and his hasty retreat – what was Loki thinking right now?

He looked at the clock by his bed – it was late; he scrambled to get some clothes on and drag himself down to breakfast. Typically of course it was one of the few mornings his parents were actually awake and about. He answered his mother’s smiling _good morning,_ ignored his father’s snide _good afternoon_ and watched Loki intently for any sign at all. Loki remained hunched over a breakfast he was hardly eating, saying nothing. Indeed he made no indication that he was aware of Thor’s presence at all, beyond a flush of red in those usually pale cheeks.

Breakfast was tense, icily silent with none of the quibbles between the brothers that generally punctuated the morning, until finally their father looked up from his paper to snap –

“Alright, what’s wrong with the pair of you?”

Thor looked up guiltily, while Loki seemed to hunch in even smaller.

“What do you mean?” he mumbled, wishing he didn’t sound so damned guilty even to his own ears. To his immense relief Loki finally spoke up –

“You’re always telling us to keep it down!”

“Yes and you don’t, that’s what’s so suspicious.”

“Odin, dear,” their mother came in again like a sweet rescue. Thor was always just a little in awe of their mother, she always seemed so cool and peaceful, today in a frothy blue dress that made him think of water in the sunlight, her voice like a breeze through the stifling room.

“I think what we’re experiencing here is our eldest’s first hangover. Have some respect.”

“Hmm,” Odin grunted, looked Thor over as though he could not help but approve at least a little – “Well get along then, if you’re done, both of you”.

For once it was Loki who bolted, out of the room before another word could be uttered, and Thor, though he would have entirely liked to do the same, left gratefully, more relieved than he would like to have been. Nevertheless the second he was out of the room he rushed off in the direction he had seen Loki take, catching up to him on the back patio and grabbing him by the back of the shirt –

“Loki! Stop!”

“Let me go Thor, damn you!” Loki wriggled, spitting and scratching like a captured cat.

“Loki, calm down I just want to talk to you!”

Loki had known this – it was the reason he had run, and as such he did not calm down for a moment.

“Loki, we need to talk!”

“There’s nothing to talk about!” Loki spat back – “I don’t want to hear it! Go away!”

“You don’t want to hear what?”

Loki finally stopped his wriggling and Thor let him go. Loki turned around angrily, roughly – indeed exaggeratedly – pulling his shirt back into place –

“I don’t want to hear you tell me you’re sorry.” He glared defiantly, arms crossed defensively across his chest.

“But –” Thor shook his head bewildered – “I wasn’t going to.”

Loki blinked, something starting to soften in the heart he had tried so hard to harden overnight, though he did not unfold his arms –

“You – weren’t?”

“No –” Thor found himself swaying a little and it occurred to him for the first time that he maybe should not be doing this with a hangover – “Loki I’m _not_ sorry – I just – I was afraid that _you_ were.”

Loki shook his head, trying hard to take this in. His forehead knit in a perplexed slowness he would usually have mocked in Thor. He walked over to the low wall overlooking the gardens and sat perched on it. Thor followed to sit, rather more heavily, beside him. Loki looked down at his feet for a while, having built up all of his worst fears into an assumption that they would come true it was slow work to unravel the discovery that was wrong. Eventually he looked sideways up at Thor, eyes shy, lips pensive –

“You’re not going to tell me it was a terrible mistake?”

Thor shook his head; even through his own confusion and the fog in his head that morning delighting to see the light come slowly back into Loki’s eyes.

“No.”

Loki smiled;

“Good,” he nodded and Thor watched him nervously wondering what they were supposed to do now, but Loki answered all his doubts this time by lying back on the wall, hands behind his head and poking Thor in the side with his toes –

“That’s all right then,” he pronounced, and that was that, no further answer needed at this time – “So tell me about your party”.

Thor smiled, breathing more freely than he thought he would be able to so soon and puzzling happily that Loki, who could make him feel so awkward in so many different ways could, when he chose, make him so quickly at ease.

He told Loki then, in all the detail he had not been able to imagine last night for it being too close to the event. Only with hindsight can a description be made as vivid as the memory needs it to be. Memory comes in brighter and sharper colours and shades than reality. So he told Loki about the lights in all their colours flying around the room like butterflies and about the people who were butterflies themselves and no more human to Thor who was not yet quite a part of this glimmering world for all he had wandered into it. He told him of the taste of champagne and the way the bubbles giggled in your throat, of the chorus of voices like a hundred different birds and their chatter just as inane. He told him how you could not look for long so close to all of this and not get blinded by the light, the suddenness the painful intensity of living in the _now._ Nobody, surely, could truly withstand it for long. He told him how his eyes would seek the darkness beyond and how he could have sworn he saw Loki’s light glimmering out across the waters and how it was a cool strange breeze and that hot bright place, a breeze he wanted to follow.

And so Loki told him about watching. About floating on the ripples, not only of the water but between inside and outside, being and not being, light and dark. He told him how distant the land seemed, the voices and the light and yet at the same time how he felt he could reach out and touch it.

“I wish I could show you how it looked to me,” they both said, in so close to the same wording that it made the laughter more than a little uneasy. They looked at each other over the nervous laughter and wished they had the words to speak feelings.

All of those feelings crowded on the lips, stretching the heart to beat drums against the chest and instead Thor told Loki how much Sif had annoyed him almost all night –

“She treated me like some kind of cute kid brother! And all she did all night was go on about her hair, how she’s going to get it bobbed but everyone knows she won’t, that she’s just saying it for attention because she’d look dreadful if she did –”

The rest of Thor’s words run a river around Loki’s ears as he stretches like a cat on the stone in the sun, a wide, wicked smile forming across his face.

__x__

That night Loki took the boat again, over the sound to the Buchanan place. If there was anything he was good at it was not being seen and he moved like a shadow through the gardens still littered with the party debris of the night before. Years of practise on their own house had him scaling these walls with ease, peering into the rooms until he found Sif’s. It occurred to him that he could use this skill one day for something more than trivial amusement, though he was not sure if he really wanted to – still it was good to consider.

Sif’s room made him think of princesses – he wished he could have one like that himself. A silver dress hung outside the wardrobe, shimmering gently in the dark like fish scales or armour, long swirling earrings and matching necklace lying in a casual heap on the dresser to match. He grinned to see Sif, fast asleep in her bed, her hair lying in such a neat plait on the pillow it was less of a challenge than he had even wished to slip in there and cut it off.

He retreated to the gentle night time waves with his prize, chuckling inside in silent victory at his misdeed, rowing for once so as not to make a sound, right out into the middle of the sound. Feeling like a triumphant warrior he whipped Sif’s hair up into the air like the scalp of his latest victim, hurling it out into the dark water, smiling gleefully to himself in satisfaction. His heart shimmered darkly, like the moon across the water as he rowed back to their house in silent delight.

__x__

**Quick note: There’s a short story also by F S Fitzgerald called “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” set in this same world in which a young girl does what Sif did in this chapter and her irritated cousin does what Loki did in retaliation. Thinking about it there was _no way_ I could not re-tell that story with these characters! Well there had to be some short break from the teenage angst! :-)**


	4. Chapter 4

 

Nobody really knows how rumours start, how news really travels; but it does so as if by magic. A voice sends the news in motion, it is picked up and carried, snowballing from mouth to mouth, from house to house until a hundred different versions are out and all of them fact before the official story ever hits the public consciousness.

So it was that by the end of breakfast on the morning Sif Buchanan looked into her dainty dressing mirror and screamed to high heaven, everybody had already heard _that_ if not _how_ her hair had been stolen. It was the talk of every table in West Egg that morning, told in tones ranging from gleeful thank-god-it-wasn’t-me sympathy from her supposed friends, to tones of unadulterated glee from her enemies. Even amongst the former, there were few who did not agree she had, at least to some degree, asked for it, and few who did not comment that she had had her own mind made up for her now on whether or not she got the bob.

In the Odinson household, their mother attempted kind sympathy while their father roared with laughter at the story. Thor took one look over the table at Loki’s quietly smirking face and went unusually quiet for the second morning running.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” he shot out fast, almost as soon as they were out from under their parents’ gaze.

“What was me?” Loki gave back, wide eyed, the face and voice of utter innocence, lounging by the outdoor pool with a book he was only pretending to read.

“Oh don’t give me that, Loki.”

“Don’t give you what?”

Thor lunged over onto the edge of Loki’s chair, grabbed his book off him and threw it perilously close to the edge of the pool.

“Hey!” Loki wailed in objection, trying as loudly as he could to make himself look like the most injured here.

“ _Sif’s hair,”_ Thor hissed in a last pretence of patience – “Someone snuck in through her window and stole it – _through her window_ Loki, come on!”

“Honestly –” Loki sat up straighter to try and make it look as though the word had any place coming out of his lips – “I’m hurt that you’d accuse me so quickly.”

“You’ll be hurt a lot more if you don’t ‘fess up, brother!”

“I’m not – oh yes fine, alright I did it!” Loki chuckled, unable to keep his amusement to himself any longer.

“ _Why?”_

“I don’t like her,” Loki shrugged – “Also it was funny – oh _come on –”_ Thor’s face quite clearly indicated he was not amused – “You can’t tell me that wasn’t funny.”

“It was _mean,”_ Thor persisted. Loki snorted sulkily, silently hurt that Thor was angry rather than amused at him as he had hoped he would be. He pouted and looked away from Thor’s gaze that seemed to be pleading with him to feel bad when he did not want to. In return to that clear, insistent frown he stubbornly said nothing and affected a look of boredom instead.

“ _You’re_ mean,” Thor added, not having wanted to say it but feeling like Loki had made him with his obstinate silence. Loki blinked very quickly like Thor knew he did when he was trying not to cry;

“ _Fine,”_ Loki snapped. “I don’t care. If I’m so mean just leave me alone – go see Sif since you like her so much.”

It was the most pitiful attempt at nonchalant uncaring Thor had ever heard; he could all but _see_ the acid in the words burning at Loki’s tongue and it hurt as though the tension he could feel in Loki was his own.

“I _don’t_ care about her –” he wished Loki would let him express himself other than angrily but then he never would – “I care about _you_ Loki –”

Loki shrugged –

“I’m good. I wouldn’t get caught.”

“That is _not_ what I mean. This – it’s beneath you Loki – you’re better than this.”

Loki snorted, and this time when he blinked his eyes squeezed tight together for a moment;

“No I’m not. Really. I’m not better than anything –” he said it as though pleading his innocence, as though he was desperate for Thor to agree with him, even if it reaffirmed his worthlessness. Thor heard it and it tore at his heart.

“ _Loki –”_ he groaned, pleadingly, ready, he knew, to do anything to teach Loki his worth in his eyes but not even knowing how he should start and as he curled a hand around Loki’s neck the words came out clumsily – “You’re better than _everything_ to me.”

Loki could not help the tears that slipped largely out from his eyes and ran silent down his face, unable to even explain to himself why this distressed him. Thor’s eyes fell closed not to have to see those tears, even though his fingers ran instantly to wipe them away and in that dark warmth behind closed eyes with the sun warm on his eyelids it was without intention, indeed it was with nothing more than purest instinct that he found himself kissing Loki again and Loki, only slightly surprised, putting away his concern and self-doubt and following every impulse to kiss back.

Whatever was to come of it, these first kisses were chanced in nothing more than absolute innocence. It was a curious feeling neither of them precisely understood, the only thing that was in no doubt at all was that it felt wonderful. Thor realised that his lips had been tingling for Loki ever since last night and now, to feed that tingle sent the head spinning, floating up into the blue sky, held in the warmth of the sun on a secret river in the sky where nothing could touch them. It was a place that once found you wanted to stay forever.

Even so close to their first kiss the movements were so much less awkward than they had been last time. It was a dance all too easily picked up, and once danced you were left both breathless and wanting beyond all things to start again. In that first breathless pause Loki asked, wide eyed –

“Is this – is this okay?” It was a mile away from what he wanted to say, from the cool composure he aspired to or indeed anything like adult behaviour and there was so much more in it than the words really acknowledged – _is this allowed, is it normal or right, can we be doing this, is there any reason this should be wrong?_ And it was clumsy not just out of childish uncertainty but because notions of right or wrong seemed so irrelevant in this case that he was not sure he should be voicing them at all.

“Yes,” Thor replied, and the answer came quickly, certainly to his lips before his mind had a chance to wonder and for that very reason he supposed he must be right – “Yes, it must be.”

If it was inadequate it was still enough for Loki who smiled and pressed his face in for another kiss, a kiss Thor fell into half laughing with delight. They were feather light and breathless kisses, tremulous and fluttering together like birds, brushing soft as wings but with all the power of flight.

All of those sensations hung in a moment, a shimmering drop of water that never would fall or shatter to the ground. The sun and the scent of the water beyond, the air and their unfinished selves pressing closer as though bending to finish any growing they had yet to do as one. That sense of delight which nothing, not even the sweetest passions, would ever quite match, curling up into a golden gem at the core of Thor’s heart. It settled there to be his cornerstone and one safe place for the rest of his life. It was a moment that faded into being a memory even in the act of living it.

As Thor drew back for the last time that day, it was on the back of a sense of understanding that now was the right time to do so. That to draw this out all day, however much he might like to, would not have been right somehow. Easy to forget too that they were children yet and with this feeling rising in him that was stronger than anything he had yet known he felt the weight of impending adulthood and was as quick to want to run from that himself as he was to want to protect Loki from it. He was not sure if there was anything so _terribly_ adult in this but it came to him strictly to remember that Loki was three years younger than he was and the risk was perhaps not yet worth taking.

“Come on,” the boy said, jumping up and smiling, taking Loki’s hand and pulling him to his feet behind him – “Let’s go play in the waves”.

Loki protested all the way down to their small stretch of beach that he had wanted to lie about and read but his protestations were feeble and easily seen through beneath the dazed feeling of happiness making him want to sway like a flower in the sunshine. He felt positively drunk with happiness to a degree he felt had to be better than actual alcohol, not just his head now but his heart reeling, butterflies in the belly that tickled him pleasantly.

As the afternoon wore on Frigga looked out down the slope of the lawn to where the two boys skimmed stones across the sea, silhouetted in the sun as it deepened towards pink. Her heart rocked at the two tiny figures down there on the thin strip of sand. She could just hear the voices that laughed and rolled their way up from the sea and could not help but hear how those voices swayed between childhood and all that lay beyond. Thor’s shouts at times had a depth that was almost entirely adult while at the same time there was a cultured note to Loki’s wavering voice that he would never have wanted to know was there, let alone that anyone could hear. She smiled a bittersweet smile to see them fight the waves and each other in a splashing so vigorous it might as well have been swimming. It clutched her heart to see them rush at the waves and to know how little she need really worry for her boys, knowing that they would be there for each other before she ever knew they needed to be.

She knew more than that. More than she would ever let them or their father know.

__x__

**I genuinely meant to get to the first sex scene in this chapter, I was gonna but then I got halfway through and realised it would ruin it utterly. So: Next chapter!!**


	5. Chapter 5

**Warning: This chapter contains underage persons engaging in sexual practices (Thor’s 15, Loki’s 14). Totally consensual but don’t read it if you hate that sort of thing!**

 

**September 1922**

There was such sadness in September, Loki could not help but feel it acutely. Something on the air that whispered change and chill, a wind that whipped right through him, leaving a squirming uneasiness in its wake, a portent of tragedy in the skeleton of a leaf. Thor did not feel it; he loved the change, the leaves turning to their myriad shades of gold and red and brown, the drifts of those crackling and paper-dry skeletons like multi coloured ash carpeting the lawns. His only sadness was to be found in Loki’s pensive face, the curious tilt of his chin as he sat on the wall in the cold, looking out at the greying sky. So often in these September days he found him like that and would alternately sit with him in stillness, waiting for Loki to talk or, on those days he felt it would work, he would do things his own way and drag Loki to playing in the leaves, make him see the beauty of the season in the scattered rubbish of the trees all over the usually immaculate lawns. He would have Loki watch the gardeners with him, trying to make those lawns immaculate only for there to be fresh leaves fallen at the start by the time they reached the end. Loki would laugh at the chaos, revel in the colour and the crunch. They would laugh picking leaves out of each others’ hair, and steal crisp cool kisses between the trees as they added to the havoc on the lawns.

Before long Loki would grow sad again and the cycle would repeat.

It was different now to other years, better in so many ways, all of them brought into being by kisses. Those warm, playful kisses of summer still sparkled gold and blue behind the eyes but in the face of Loki’s autumn sadness they grew deeper, more necessary, something far scarier and more important. For all the melancholy, Thor could see the chill suiting Loki, bringing out a beauty that was not quite fully formed and that he had not noticed before. It was something ethereal and lovely and it made him almost sad with the need to touch – to reach for that silver exquisiteness that looked so in danger of blowing away on the next gust of wind. In his quiet, thoughtful moods Loki would find himself drowning deeper into Thor’s stolen kisses than he thought that he could fall, his neck arching back and his need stabbing him like the claws of approaching winter. More and more they were not quite just kissing, more and more reaching for something neither of them quite understood, but could feel the tug of enough to want it terribly. Thor’s hands would land on Loki’s offered throat and Loki would draw away at the end to find he had been clutching Thor’s arm with a desperation he had not been consciously aware of.

As the need grew, so did Loki come less and less to Thor’s room at night. At first he had come as before and before long on each occasion they had been kissing beneath the covers, pressing more and more closely in the dark. In that warm, dark closeness the instinct was stronger to go further, to reach for more, Thor’s hands roaming Loki’s body with a hungrier and hungrier need, his hands learning more than looking would ever allow, how much his brother was changing, growing for all he still felt so small- almost bird like in his hands. It was getting harder and harder to stop, harder and harder to sleep and so, though it hurt in more ways than he had ever imagined, Loki had stopped. After the cool silvery morning he had woken up first and his body had ached strangely to see how beautiful Thor was in the early sunlight – he had kissed his cheek and hurried back to his own bed. He had lain there, heart racing, staring up at the ceiling, wondering as he wondered every night since, what it was that was happening to them.

That morning Thor had woken up alone, and never felt his aloneness more so. Loki had been distant all that day – he had not even been able to speak to him and then, that night, he had slept not a bit; waiting up all the night watching out for the green light that never came. Listening out for the stars to ring and never hearing a thing. The next night Loki did not come he had cried himself to sleep and it was days before he could bring himself to ask him why. Loki had almost jumped out of his skin at the question, eyes wide as a deer, as though Thor might shoot him any moment. He had replied so simply and quickly –

“I’m scared,” that Thor could not have been angry if he tried. After so many days and nights apart they had kissed again, joyfully, and afterwards Thor had not had to think for long before realising he understood Loki’s fear completely, indeed he shared it.

And so they kissed in the daylight where they could watch themselves and stop themselves and between them brewed the strangest mixture of desperation and restraint. They could quiver in the naughtiness, in the thrill of getting caught, whilst not wanting it in the slightest – and it distracted suitably enough from their own fears to carry on.

So it was until an evening towards the end of September , the evening of Loki’s fourteenth birthday.

Birthdays were quiet things in the Odinson household, and Loki liked it that way. Thor did not and had been demanding a proper party for the last three years. Loki had shied from the idea of any particular celebration at all, and so it was an unspoken agreement that these nights were ordinary and yet not so, for the family would spend much of it together in one room, being the family they very rarely were.

This evening was different though. Loki had accepted presents in good grace but then stopped to wonder why his parents were dressed to go out. He had fallen into a nervous quiet that Thor had interpreted accurately; Thor himself poised on the edge of the catastrophe he could almost smell coming.

“Are you going somewhere?” he asked them in the deferential tone he knew Loki was not good at. His mother had given a slightly guilty _yes_ while his father had filled in that they were going to a party at the Caraway’s.

“That’s alright isn’t it darling?” Frigga asked Loki, cautiously across the room. Loki, knowing that in the face of their being dressed and ready to leave, this was hardly a real question, had nodded  vigorously, making a tight _mmmhmm_ sound in his throat that had Thor glancing at him, nostrils flaring in anger on his behalf.

Their parents having left in a flurry of oblivion, Thor watched Loki warily for several moments as hectic red spots rose up in his cheeks and he could see him, sat by the fire, chest heaving as his breathing quickened furiously. Loki said nothing, but his lip twitched and jerked into an ugly curling sneer and still not saying a word he threw two of his books violently across the room, stood up sharply and stormed out in silence, fists clenched stiffly at his sides.

Thor stood hopelessly in the sitting room for a while, torn between knowing that Loki hated to be disturbed when he was upset and the idea of him crying and curled in on himself up in his room alone. Eventually he walked slowly over to pick Loki’s books up and put them somewhere neat, knowing that he would regret any damage done to them later, whatever his feelings now. He noticed as he held them that, consciously or not, he had thrown the ones from their father and none from himself or their mother. Thor sighed deeply, steeled himself, and headed up the main stairs to Loki’s room. He felt, heading up the curve of the stairs to the left, suddenly like a very small boy in a house that was far too big. He was glad he was going to where Loki was, whatever he got for it.

Still, he paused just outside Loki’s door, long enough to know that Loki was certainly crying in there, felt bad for hearing it and knocked. The crying sound stopped very suddenly and Loki’s voice came through the door ain an angry yell –

“Go away Thor!”

Thor dithered, took another deep breath, steeled himself again and tried the door. It opened. He ducked, out of lessons long learnt and sure enough something sailed over his head and crashed into the bannister rail of the hall outside. Inside Loki sprang to his feet, fists still clenched, looking around himself as though for something else to throw.

“Loki –” Thor put his hands up, edging towards Loki as one would a wild animal – “Loki, stop that.”

“Why?” Loki spat, his searching eyes finding the small clock on his mantelpiece and throwing it so badly, Thor could not help thinking it was as if he _wanted_ to miss him – “Who cares?” Loki added, voice rough – “I could break _everything_ and they still wouldn’t notice – _fuck_ them – fuck _this –_ I don’t care – I don’t give a _damn,_ do you hear?”

“ _I_ care –” Thor said, simply, voice almost as rough as Loki’s, he so hated to see him upset. He knew that upset and angry as he was, he was not as vicious as he tried to be; he had unswerving faith in his ability to make him feel better, to be there, always and exactly what Loki needed, even if it was not what he wanted – “Loki _I care._ Stop this –” he took a cautious few steps towards him and as soon as he was close enough Loki returned it by pushing him and hissing. The push did not budge Thor, who instead leaned into it, wresting Loki into being hugged while Loki scratched and fought it, Thor all the time murmuring his name in a soothing stream of love it was impossible even for Loki not to hear.

“Thor stop it –” he snarled, though Thor could hear him softening with every word – “Get off me –” he grunted – “I hate you Thor, I hate you –” but by the last _I hate you_  his words had become weak, dissolving into tears, his fists like kitten paws batting at Thor’s chest, Thor whispering _hush Loki hush_ and stroking his hair as Loki crumpled into his arms, Thor finding he was taking all of Loki’s weight and going to his knees on the floor with his little brother trying to crawl into his lap. Loki buried his head in Thor’s shoulder, his sobs subsiding quicker than he would have liked them to.

Thor stroked Loki’s hair and back, comforting him as he had in these rages since Loki was old enough to tantrum. He could feel the little body calming beneath his hands and was shocked with how much he felt himself loving him. He wished he could tell Loki the full extent of it; wished he could take away how uncared for Loki felt purely on the strength of his own emotions. Surely if Loki could know how it strained Thor’s heart to bursting point he could never feel unloved again.

Then Loki blew his nose on Thor’s sleeve and Thor could not hold back a groan of disgust. Loki chuckled and looked at him, grinning, eyes sparkling feverishly with the tears he was brushing away. Those eyes, normally silvery went almost brightly green when he had been crying, as though the old colour were washed away, replaced with this dazzling new glow. Thor smiled to hear that chuckle, even if his sleeve _was_ upsettingly moist. It was Loki then, who pushed his head forward, catlike, to kiss Thor and Thor, so gently this time, returning the kiss. It seemed to Loki as though this really could wipe out all the sadness, transforming the way his head spun from crying into a lovely delirious swirl that heightened even the normal pleasure of the kiss.

“Thor –” he whispered, eyes wide and terrified Thor would refuse him – Thor could not believe he could do that, for it was surely set in stone now that he would never refuse him anything? – “Take me to bed?”

Thor’s heart hitched in so many directions he was afraid Loki would hear it pounding in his chest. There was so much in that question of the small boy who had asked him this same thing when they were very little and their parents were not around to say goodnight. There was also an adult on Loki’s tongue and behind his eyes that Thor had not seen or heard before and his heart hammered for not knowing in which way Loki meant it.

In truth, Loki did not entirely know himself. He was aware of both aspects in his question and suspected then that he meant it in both ways.

Either way Thor picked him up like he weighed nothing and carried him the short way to his bed. Loki wriggled under the covers and a moment later Thor watched his hand come out, throwing his clothes over the side of the bed.

“Th-or –” came the muffled voice from under the covers – “Come in with me.”

Thor hesitated a moment; he barely knew how to understand Loki like this, he was both more a child now than usual and suddenly an adult. After weeks of not sleeping together he wanted this terribly and yet he was scared, both of that adult in Loki’s voice and at the same time that he was too vulnerable to touch as he knew he wanted to. Then Loki’s voice came, wailing his name again and he got into bed without another thought.

“For god’s sake you idiot – take your clothes off, you’re in bed.”

Loki’s little voice was so world weary in that moment that Thor laughed enough not to be afraid as his clothes joined Loki’s on the floor.

“Come here,” Loki said, and they curled into each other under the covers, keeping down in the dark, embarrassed at each other’s nakedness and their own.

“Kiss me,” Loki said, in that voice that could not decide at any point to be one thing or another – this time a plea or an order. It did not matter; Thor did, his initial caution swiftly melting away as Loki’s kisses became fiercer than he had expected, Loki’s body strange and soft and wonderful beneath his hands. The strangeness of feeling this skin on skin was soon overpowered by how delicious it felt and Thor’s concerns were soon drowned in an ecstasy of touching, wanting to know this feeling beneath his hands, against his chest, more completely than he had ever wanted anything.

“Thor –” Loki breathed in the moment of reaching for air, then broke off at the curious, oddly thrilling sensation of hardness against his leg – “What is that?”

Thor wanted to curse his cock for not behaving – it was not the first time this had happened but with nothing between them it was the first time he had been unable to hide it from Loki. He tried to pull away, to heed the call of his brain beyond the louder cry of his body to stay but Loki clutched onto him with that strength he had but so rarely displayed –

“No –” he insisted – “Stay –” his face was determined and intensely interested – “What is that?”

“Loki I –” Thor tried to object, but Loki’s wicked, wandering fingers were on his hip, so close to his aching cock that he thought he would stop breathing or explode.

“Can I touch it?”

Thor closed his eyes, wondering if he was going to wake up, he had had dreams so like this it seemed unreal. Loki did not wait for the reply Thor’s lips refused to form, his fingertips, light as a kiss on Thor’s cock, making Thor groan and squirm, every bit as exquisite as he had imagined. Loki smiled almost innocently at the curious sensation beneath his fingers, stroking Thor’s hardness which seemed to grow and twitch in his hand –

“Does it – feel good?” he asked in the simplest curiosity. Thor’s eyes were rolling and all he could manage was a groan and a hoarse curse that Loki took as affirmative to continue. He had no sooner curled his hand in a gentle grip around Thor’s cock than Thor was gasping, almost growling, going into what felt like a spasm in Loki’s hand, his fingers digging into his brother’s shoulder as he came, spilling his seed into Loki’s little hand. He fell back breathless and almost laughed when Loki made a simple pronouncement –

“Sticky”. But then he watched Loki put his fingers to his lips to lick them curiously and the laughter died in his throat, his cock jerking immediately at the sight. Loki, watching him, smirked mischievously at the reaction and continued to lick his fingers with much more obvious, wicked intent.

“Loki –” Thor groaned, flailing, hardly able to move, with his cock almost entirely hard again – “Dear god – do that again!”

Loki grinned, adult wisdom and childish happiness dancing in his eyes;

“No,” he said, like a song, far too lightly for Thor not to suspect he was up to something.

“No?” he echoed.

“Not until you do it to me,” he smiled, taking Thor’s hand and guiding it down his body. He let go after just a few seconds as Thor’s hands became eager, hungry to do it themselves. Thor rolled over to watch Loki as he took him in his hand, nothing more needed than his gentle explorative touch to have his little brother squirming within moments. He watched Loki’s face as he came and the beauty of his delight made him want to do nothing else for the rest of his life.

Indeed it was hours of taking turns later that they came to rest, boats in the harbour of one another’s arms, sticky as Loki said, satisfied and proud as though they had just invented something new, discovered some incredible secret nobody else in the world was party to.

“I love you,” Thor said, yawning. It was so simple, so necessary to say.

“I love you Thor,” Loki echoed fervidly, his truth as much as Thor’s.

“Good birthday?”

Loki beamed –

“The best.”

__x__

**Perhaps curiously given some of the things I’ve written in the past – this is the first time I’ve ever made myself blush! :-)**

 


	6. Chapter 6

 

After the night of his fourteenth birthday, Loki’s nervous absence from Thor’s bedroom ended. There was nothing to be afraid of anymore, and everything they desired to be had. Thor would lie awake in bed, waiting with a smile of anticipation, body in a hum of readiness in the knowledge that Loki would come. His heart and cock would leap to see that green light glow outside his window and Loki, knowing the state in which Thor waited, was never long from his bed. Sometimes he would make him wait, past the point of expectation, knowing it was a torture for Thor that stayed sweet as long as Loki always eventually appeared.

It had been a shock, if not a wholly unpleasant one, on waking up that first morning to find that however many times they had brought each other to that incredible new found point – he could still wake up wanting it again and again. Not even as much as he had before, he found himself wanting it more than ever for knowing how wonderful these new feelings could feel. Never one for savouring a pleasure, Thor reached for what he wanted at every available opportunity, throwing himself into the pursuit of it with ever excited lust and a hunger that was more that of a young animal than a human. He knew that he was pursuing Loki, persistent to the point of recklessness, barely needing more than from those crafty little hands to close around his cock before that pleasure that so shook the world overtook him. This pleasure sang through the ears like the bubbles in champagne, but a thousand times more golden, more incredible. There was a power in it too that he supposed should humble him, but instead called to him, a powerful shimmering storm that he ran towards with open arms, all the more for knowing that Loki ran with him.

Late one night, after their parents had finally gone to bed, the boys had sneaked downstairs, to stand starry eyed in the midst of the party debris that inevitably coated the house at this hour of the morning like a rainbow indoor flurry of fallen snow. They stood amongst the dazzling streams of junk, temporarily blinded from purpose, rewinding the evening to imagine how this all had come about. To bring to life the music and the dance they heard so faintly from above, if never faintly enough to allow them to sleep. It was Loki of course, less intrigued by this kaleidoscope world than Thor was, who nudged him in the ribs and found a half bottle of champagne to sneak back up to their room.

They tasted it giggling beneath the covers, and the sensation of forbidden fruit was surely every bit tastier than the drink itself. Champagne kisses and glittering whispers danced beneath the covers on Thor’s bed like magic lights until Loki spilled gold and bubbles into his hands and Thor became instantly captivated by that little mouth sucking the sweetness from his fingers. The next spill was no accident, as Thor coated his fingers and put them to Loki’s lips. He groaned as Loki licked then clean and the idea came as though it were genius on his part – how those lips might feel around his cock. Loki looked at him like he had gone mad when he suggested it, but, ever true to his intent to try everything in the world, he had soon dipped his head between his brother’s legs and taken the already hard flesh into his mouth. Just to feel how violently it made Thor jerk, lacing his fingers with his as they clutched at the bed sheets – it was enough for Loki to become addicted to this for life. The surge of power that rocked his head was like a storm beneath the sheets and champagne spilled across the floor uncared for as he drank deeply and thirstily as Thor came into his mouth.

This time Thor had not needed to ask him to do that again, for Loki had sought it to the point where, some days, he felt he was chasing him for more.

They were joyful weeks as the winter came on, so often cooped up in the house that it was often not until after dark that these moments could be snatched at and so greedily consumed. More and more Thor came to know that he would never want anybody else like this, indeed as he found himself thinking so often through the day of the things they got up to at night, he came to suspect he would never want anyone else at all. He would smile to himself as they lounged around the house and when Loki met his eye and smiling back, guessed his thoughts, it would confirm all his suspicions that nobody else would ever do. He basked in Loki’s smile and did all he could to eke it out as often as he could.

The clearer this understanding became – that there would never be anyone else in his life like this – so too grew the awareness that it was perhaps not as things should be. People did not marry their brothers and yet he knew without a doubt that if he could have he would have done it in a heartbeat. The more he read, the more he heard people talk, the more he realised that his feelings were actually considered wrong. Nothing in his heart could have told him this, nor anything in Loki’s touch or in his kiss. He could not, for all he discovered, bring himself to feel this sense of wrong on any level beyond a niggling fear of discovery or a concern that this state of perfection could not last forever. On the whole though, he was never one to let his present be troubled by fear of the future, instead enjoying their present for all he was worth. He often caught enough concern hanging in Loki’s eyes to do for both of them and was not going to add to it by being infected by it.

Loki _did_ let himself be troubled – if not more, certainly as much as he enjoyed their current state of being. He knew that to want anything to last was like wanting childhood to last – with the only exception that he _did_ want this to last – wanted it so deeply he pushed it away. He settled for _knowing_ things would eventually go wrong rather than allowing himself the deeper worry of hoping that they might not.

In these days he barely spoke to his parents anymore, and for several weeks through October they made no effort to understand why. It irked him even that they would not tell him off for moodiness or rudeness and took this simply as further evidence of their lack of caring. Then eventually, a few days before Halloween, his mother talked him into helping her put decorations up.

It was the first party to be held in their house to which the boys had been given permission to come. In truth _Thor_ had been given permission to come, their father citing the usual excuse of Loki being too young, but Thor had stoically put aside his instinctive excitement and insisted he would not go anywhere without Loki, going so far as to argue with his father on the matter until Odin had given in. Since then he had stopped trying to contain his excitement. Loki, on the other hand refused to acknowledge any feelings on the matter at all, telling Thor he should not have bothered and refusing to be drawn into any display of interest. Nevertheless he had spent an afternoon on the floor with Thor carving pumpkins and throwing the insides at each other while their mother strung lights across the house in readiness for the party. When Thor, cursing Loki merrily, had got up to wash seeds out of his hair their mother had, in a moment of excellent timing come over to comment –

“Loki, those are positively ghastly!”

Loki grinned, unable to hold back how pleased he was with his ghoulish set of faces.

“I’m sorry about your birthday,” his mother added, apropos of nothing, letting it drop so casually he would never have guessed how long and hard she had been waiting for a moment in which he might accept it.

“What?” Loki almost jumped.

“We really thought you wouldn’t mind. It was wrong of us – I’m sorry”.

Loki looked down at the floor fiercely, flushing red with the effort of re-working at least part of his brain into a place where he could not be angry – at least with his mother anymore.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mumbled. His mother grinned, a smile more similar to her son’s than anyone would have noticed –

“Of course you don’t,” she sighed and patted him on head affectionately, regretting it just a second later, for Loki was no cleaner than Thor had been. She scooped down to hug him instead and Loki flailed exaggeratedly and moaned –

“Moooo-oom!” groaning louder as Thor chose that moment to reappear – “Thor she’s killing me!” Thor grinned, seeing only that their mother at least had finally been forgiven.

“Your father’s sorry too,” she added, as she went back to balancing on chairs, but to this Loki simply scowled, knowing it was not entirely true.

Nevertheless, in the few days they still had left before Loki’s first party he finally allowed himself to be excited about it, and this time, as they got ready in the evening it was Loki taking up the mirror, squinting and preening in the effort to meet his expectations of perfection, turning to Thor and asking –

“How do I look?”

And Thor, something catching in his throat to see the man in his little brother’s eyes, to see how beautiful he was and a momentary glimpse of how he would be, shaking the vision as though it had taken hold of him from the future, smiling –

“Grown up.”

He placed his hands on Loki’s shoulders, smiling at them both in the mirror and Loki’ image smiling back at him –

“Is that all?”

“Gorgeous,” Thor added warmly, though it was not enough for all he felt, nor enough for how suddenly Loki had shrugged off that look of a boy rapidly rushing into being a man and not entirely certain if he liked it. He turned Loki round to face him, tracing his jaw with a gentle hand – “God –” he added, choking up again as Loki’s eyes caught and held him tight – “But you are beautiful Loki –” his hand curled round the back of his brother’s neck, his other taking his hand and tracing circles in his wrist – “How am I supposed to keep from touching you all night?” he whispered, leaning in until their foreheads touched. Loki gave a hoarse little laugh, moving his lips in close enough to kiss and then all but dancing out of Thor’s arms just as he leant in for that kiss –

“ _Restraint –”_ he whispered, his breath warm and all too brief on Thor’s skin – “You should try it some time, you oaf.”

Thor followed Loki’s light, teasing steps down the stairs, knowing Loki would force him to test his tonight and wondering how he would ever manage.

__x__

**:-)**

**I am saying nothing at all about what may be occurring next chapter. Nothing….at….all…..:-)**

**Eh heh. Heheheheheheh.**

**(Also I apologise – it is now school holidays and work gets crazy at this time, so I may not be able to update as frequently for the next few weeks, also the heatwave is killing me ‘cause we just don’t know how to handle sun in the north of England!!!)**


	7. Chapter 7

The lights dazzled and the music swayed and deafened, a cacophony of swinging sound and sparkle. All of the boys’ senses stretched and tingled, unfurling tendrils straining to take it all in. It was like walking into a great mirror ball and seeing it dash refractions out to splash across the house and grounds. Lights shimmered all the way down to the sea and the strange people shimmered beneath them, ethereal as mythical creatures to the boys’ enchanted eyes. Mermaid women in scaled dresses, sharp-faced animal ladies in furs, the bird girls in their feathers; they swam and flew through the rippling lights of the tinkling chandeliers, light that streamed over the shiny surfaces of this strange new world. Strangest of all though were the men, for they had been assured that they would one day grow into such creatures themselves and it was a curious concept, harder to picture than any fantastical beast. Indeed they may as well have been told they would grow into centaurs, it seemed so bizarre a transformation. Standing on its threshold, adulthood only seemed a more distant realm than ever.

They moved through this strange sea in a trance; almost as though they were truly under water, Thor smiling faintly to be a part of this shimmering shoal at last, Loki curious and faintly uncomfortable, in truth feeling more without the circle of light than ever, now that he was faced with the actuality of being inside it. It was not until Thor, who snapped out of it first, nudged him, that he even realised he was following his big brother like a shadow.

“Go!” Thor whispered, gently – “Mingle!”

Loki scowled, not entirely certain that he wanted to, and a little hurt that Thor wanted him gone, though one parting look from Thor almost entirely reassured him that it might not have been so much that Thor did not want him as quite the reverse. The dark in his brother’s eyes was barely concealed, even in the rainbow of lights reflected therein. Thor was relieved, upon seeing people he knew, only because that way he supposed he might just about survive the night.

It was difficult, even as he talked so lightly, casually taking a drink with Fandral and Hogun – it was _so_ difficult to stop his eyes ever sliding back to Loki. He had never seen him quite so ethereally beautiful, pale and gleaming in the brightness even as he seemed to instinctively cringe beneath the light. Just to see his eyes glittering so brightly green and silver, or the sight of those slender fingers curled around the stem of a champagne flute was nearly enough to destroy him. He would find his own fingers trembling around a glass he would be quite surprised to find he had already drained dry. He wished, futilely, that his little brother were just a little less exquisite, less perfect.

It occurred to Thor, as the evening wore on, that though Loki was not, as such, actually following him, he was _there_ every time his needy, searching eyes darted through the crowds to find him – he was never far at all, always leaning nonchalantly against a pillar or over a rail looking out, slender, dark and slightly demonic in this crowd of heavenly creatures. Even when his little group moved out into the gardens Loki was lingering, without Thor ever having seen him move, just outside the corner of Thor’s eye, quick and watchful as a gentle spider. It seemed to Thor – though Loki would never have confirmed such a suspicion – that every time he looked up Loki in turn averted his eyes from whatever it was he had himself been watching. It was an un-nerving certainty that Loki would always be somewhere nearby, though he knew, reluctantly, how quickly he would panic if he had not been able to catch him within that quick sweep of his glance. Even so he wished he could see Loki talk to at least _someone_ at some point in the night.

Loki had weighed up the idea of interaction and found it, at this time, to be wanting. The contrast to Thor that he always had to be, he could not simply enjoy or revel whole – heartedly in the music, the chatter and the dance. Curious though he was of it all, a part of him felt trapped inside this mirror ball, claustrophobic in the expanse of the crowd. He could not help but feel something repellent in it all, feel it like a tingle that drew him to the source, the sense that something grim had to slithering beneath all of that slick surface and insubstantial shine. It was all a shimmer, like a magical glamour, a front that could be easily ripped away to see what maggots squirmed in its rotten underside. Oh but he was drawn to it, yes, drawn to that slithering thing, wanted to be the one to rip the face off of the world like a scab and yet the shimmer drew him too – the chatter and interaction of humanity, like apes for all their suits and sequins. Did they not realise that in all that fur, those feathers, with that inane babble, they emulated the animals they thought they were so much superior to? He caught himself smiling to think of how easily he could manipulate them to one will – _his_ will, snare them all so easily like the shimmering school of fish that they appeared.

And yet then, always, there was Thor; relentless, unavoidable, beloved. The beacon that always brought him back up from the darkest depth of thought. He despised it and was relieved by it in equal measure; as though there were a rope tied inside his heart, linked to a similar knot in Thor’s chest. They would always pull at each other and it would hurt when one of them drifted too far, but to stretch beyond a certain point would kill them both most painfully.

He suspected that with this tether there was only _so_ bad he could ever be – but that if it were true the reverse had to also be the case for Thor.

When Thor finally found himself alone in the gardens part way through the night, he felt the prickle at his neck that told him he was being watched with more intent than ever. He turned to see Loki, slinking into the trees at the side of the lawn, throwing a sly, radiant _follow me_ smile over his shoulder, a clear call that Thor could not possibly do anything but obey. He followed Loki as though his smile were a spell – a spell he fell under too quickly and easily every single time.

He caught up to his brother under the trees, as Loki had clearly meant for him to do, leaning back against the trunk of an ancient ash like a maiden chained there and he the dragon. Subterranean shadow winged angles across Loki’s face, rendering him magically adult beneath the blackish green and emerald black, his face pale in the watery moonlight that trickled down through the leaves. Again that photo – flash feeling that struck Thor so often in these days, a bright, crystalline knowledge –

_I will remember you like this forever._

But above it all the raging hunger that could not stand one more knowing, falling upon those soft, sly and delicately smiling lips like a hunter shoving his captured creature back against the bark, Loki gasping at the scratch of the wood against his neck.

Loki laughed when he had the moment to, breathless, as Thor’s fiercely roaming hands tugged pleadingly at his belt and it took all of his strength in every possible way to duck out of those circling arms;

“Brother – really, how much time do you think we have?” he grinned, more teasing than Thor could bear. Thor groaned, realising too late that these torturous kisses were all Loki had ever planned to allow him right now.

“You little beast –” he began to growl.

“Oh yes –” Loki positively purred, laughingly, moving like a breeze, around the tree and back again – “ _I’m_ a beast –” he grasped Thor’s neck in one cupped hand – “Now kiss me, brother.”

Thor gave a groan that went all the way down to his feet, taking all he could from the offered lips, whispering filth and need into Loki’s ear, breath hot against his neck –

“I want to do everything in the world to you.”

Loki returned the whisper, lips low against Thor’s neck, heads together, nuzzling in –

“And later, brother, you can start – but for now –” he bestowed the most terribly sweet and lightest of kisses on Thor’s cheek, fingers evilly brushing the dreadful throbbing between his legs, quite clearly to aggravate rather than soothe the need –

“Down boy,” he hissed.

By the time Thor had got himself together enough to yell, insult – or even react at all – Loki was already headed half way back towards the lights, a dark speck retreating up the lawn.

__x__

 

**Okay I am _so sorry_ but once again this has got longer than it should and instead of doing the whole night as one chapter I’m gonna give you this now and the next half in another chapter! ….otherwise I just know I’ll start hurrying stuff that is not meant to be hurried! Oh yes also, I’m evil. :-) *Grins***

**I s’pose now is the time I should tell you – Sapsorrow is a lie – I really am Loki :-P**

**Heh heh.**


	8. Chapter 8

 

 

**Here you go my children!**

**Underage sex here and light slapping. Do with that what you wish!**

He never would remember quite how he survived the rest of that night. Every time he caught Loki’s eye it was only to catch sight of a more wicked little grin than ever. Each time he told himself this glance was the last, each time he glanced back, he wondered if he had managed to leave it more than a few minutes this time. Eventually, finally, almost with delight, he lost sight of Loki in the flurrying chaos of guests departing that seemed like it would never end.

Finally he found himself standing, alone and stranded on the shore of party debris, washed up here after the storm like a piece of drift wood, the salt water flush of champagne in his nose and mouth, head and legs unsteady from the shipwreck of the night.

And into this shivering not – quite calm, came a voice in his ear to break him  –

“Good party?” it drawled, tearing him to fragments.

He jumped and then instantly groaned. Loki was standing inches behind him, lips and eyes glittering in a smile. Thor instantly ran a hand through his hair in the attempt to regain some posture –

“I fucking hate you, Loki.”

“Of course you do”.

Thor grasped him round the back of the neck and it was all Loki could do to lean away, not out of any real unwillingness but simply a fierce desire not to get caught before they had even begun –

“Not here you idiot, there’s still a few people around. Honestly!”

“Hmm, why do I never trust that word when it comes out of your mouth?”

“Because you’re not _quite_ as dumb as you look?”

“Shut up, Loki.”

“Make me.”

Thor moved in again, common sense flailing beneath the remorseless ache of lust. Again Loki pushed him away –

“ _Not. Here!”_ he hissed – “Oh for god’s sake –” grasping Thor’s hand and starting to lead him up the stairs like a dog – “Come along boy!”

Thor growled in weak disapproval at this treatment, almost stumbling up the stairs that Loki seemed to glide up so fluently. He would make him pay, he grumbled to himself – he would take that smug grin off his face and the spring out of his step. Loki would not be able to _walk_ let alone glide so damnably effortlessly by the time he was through with him. He growled this to Loki under his breath as they reached the top of the stairs. Loki’s eyes sparkled –

“Is that a promise?” he grinned as they stumbled in through his bedroom door.

“A threat,” Thor countered, whipping Loki round as soon as they were safely inside and slamming him against the door to close it. For a split second, Loki finally looked nervous before Thor fell on him, wolf-like and snarling, hands grasping, scratching, kissing with teeth and heat and sweltering need. It was not enough, however hard he crushed into Loki with all of his body pressed hard against his, it was not enough for what he had been wanting all night. When he stopped his fevered kisses to concentrate on the buttons of Loki’s shirt he was panting as though he had been running for his life. It _felt_ like he had been running for his life, like it was necessary to his entire existence to have his brother now, as completely as he had always needed to. He could no longer remind himself that Loki was still technically a child, there had been nothing of the child in him all night, as though Loki had cast some glamour to make him forget. He could not care and Loki did not want him to. His hands shook on the buttons but he swatted Loki’s hands away like flies when he tried to help, angry with desire, ripping the fabric instead, his hands everywhere, tearing and dragging until Loki was naked beneath him;

“ _Fuck –_ ” he hissed – “ _Loki –”_ he groaned as his vengeful hands fed upon that soft - hard pale skin, kneading every inch of that perfect body to bruise and claim and own, too far beyond reason to form any endearment beyond the constant recitation of his brother’s name, spilling from his mouth like a waterfall of prayer, a damned prayer filled with curses.

“God Loki,” he groaned into his shoulder, finally aware that he had been helplessly rutting against him, hard and pained this whole time – “You have no idea what you do to me –”

“Actually –” Loki’s grin came back crooked and mean as a Halloween pumpkin – “Yeah – I do.” And for want of being able to move anything else, pinioned as he was by the full weight of an intense Thor, he raised just one knee to brush against Thor’s cock. Shocked by the touch and disgusted by the lightness in Loki’s voice, Thor did not mean to do what he did next but no force on earth could have stopped him – he slapped Loki, a furious crack across the face. Instant feelings of horror, arousal and consequently confusion drenched him and he was almost ready to back off entirely from regret as he studied Loki’s reaction, every inch of him trembling. Loki stared at him, open mouthed in the shock Thor had expected and then – what he had not imagined – the almost instant hardening of Loki’s cock, the darkness spreading through his eyes and the low breathless whisper –

“Again.”

He had hoped at best for a swift forgiveness; he had not imagined for one moment that Loki would like it, and he stared at him stupidly for a moment until Loki’s eyes narrowed into black slits and he hissed almost viciously –

“ _Again.”_

Thor slapped him again and he could not deny that it sent a fresh ache to his cock like a bolt of lightning. Loki gasped, snarled and wound his arms around Thor’s neck like a choking trap, all that beautiful restraint he had been so proud of blown apart, his soft little lips fierce and savage upon Thor’s, for all their difference in size, pushing Thor back until he fell onto the bed and straddling him. Thor allowed this for as long as it took Loki to scramble him out of his clothes with fingers that only just did not shake, then he wrestled him back to being beneath him. Their cocks and bodies slid together in the most delicious friction imaginable and Thor had to use every last ounce of his control not to come in that instant. He was so close – but he pulled away, slowly easing Loki round onto his knees –

“Want –” he choked – “Inside you – do you –”

“Yes Thor –” Loki tried to sound patronising but it came out hoarse and only ever so slightly superior – “I know how it works. Please –”

Thor’s hands were rough on his backside, and suddenly, seeing how large they looked there it occurred to Thor to be concerned –

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

Loki looked at him slowly and slightly knowingly over his shoulder, a raise of the eyebrows that suggested he knew better and a silent _oh don’t you – don’t you really?_

“Thor –” he hissed, Thor’s finger gently stroking the opening it meant to invade and driving him crazy with it – “Shut the fuck up”. A moment later he screamed as Thor’s finger slid inside him, thrashing and fighting and twisting back round so they were facing –

“Jesus _fuck_ Thor! You can’t just – for god’s sake – here!” he reached for the jar on the side of his bed and handed it to Thor –

“Vaseline. Use it! I said you could hurt me, not fucking kill me!”

Loki huffed one more time before wriggling back around and presenting Thor his backside, positively expectantly. Thor slowly dipped his fingers into the jar –

“Where did you – how -?” he fumbled.

“I’ve been practising,” Loki’s voice was muffled in the pillow and Thor filed away the intent to question him about this for later. This time he slid one and then two fingers into Loki with greater ease , Loki whimpering softly but opening up for him slowly and finally Thor could sense a change in the way Loki’s body twitched around his fingers, drawing him in as Loki’s whimpers became threaded through with pleasure. It was a nightmare to be patient at a time like this and beneath the sound of that pleasure he removed his fingers and replaced them with the head of his suffering cock. He pushed in, harder than he meant to for wanting this longer and more than he had wanted anything. He could see Loki’s hands, knuckles white, clutching the bed sheets and heard a muffled sob. He stopped, almost dying for the feel of that incredible, divine tightness squeezing on his cock –

“Should I – stop?” he was not sure if he _could_ but to his relief Loki gritted out a shuddering –

“Don’t you – fucking – dare!”

Thor could have cried in relief and thrust into Loki until he was buried to the hilt, Loki desperate to take it despite how much it hurt and Thor, looking down and seeing how  painfully gorgeous his little brother looked, filled so obscenely with his cock, grunted and thrust in again, Loki screaming into his pillow as quietly as he could so that he would not stop.

Thor could _not_ have stopped now, however much Loki screamed, holding onto Loki’s hips and thrusting in savagely, delighting in how strong Loki was however small and breakable he looked. He slammed into him like thunder against the earth and thanked god the earth did not break before the crash. Even Loki’s tears, streaming like a river in this storm, could not stop him, his sobs were so mingled with a furiously growing ecstasy as Thor’s cock filled him to the breaking point and brushed against every sensitive nerve inside him until his screams had turned to delight before he even knew it himself. Thor’s hands, holding Loki, slid around his hips, pounding into Loki not just with his cock but so that Loki could feel him against him, every bit of him, his hands finding Loki’s cock, and finding it to be so hard they almost shook, stroking him as he continued to pound years of wanting and relief into that little body that took it so extraordinarily.

Loki found the pain making all of his senses sing and that with the pleasure all at once was almost too much, he was afraid he might faint. He heard Thor roar like the sea beyond, and clutch his hips, felt the heat of him coming, shuddering and rushing into his body and came himself, swept along in that flood. His orgasm in turn dragged Thor’s out in a circling undertow of delirious ecstasy, a shared relief that felt so briefly endless and all powerful.

Thor drew out of Loki gently, fingers tenderly caressing the bruises he had left on soft skin, kissing each bruise as Loki fell onto his face. He lay there, still and shaking gently until Thor began to worry.

“Loki?” he stroked Loki’s hair, the back of his neck, tender strokes like a paintbrush across his hot and trembling skin – “Loki, you okay?”

Loki turned his face, to smile up at Thor as Thor settled down beside him, the smile blissful, light headed and floating –

“Fiiiiine –” Loki drawled, all his senses addled, and Thor laughed, drawing him gently into his arms, so careful now not to hurt this, the most precious thing in his world.

“I love you Loki,” he said, for there was nothing else, that was not too dumb or too pointless to say.

“I love you,” Loki replied, for once without a fight.

“I’ll never love anyone else,” Thor added, for though he supposed he should have been too young to know he did know, firmly and with no doubt that it was utterly true. The wind whispered and the leaves blew up against the walls outside and the trees, newly stripped of these leaves caught the words and held them safe in their branches to remember.

Loki, listening to the whispers of the future , hearing truth and fate in Thor’s honest assertion, suspected very much that it would be true for him to say the same. But for one reason or another he did not.

Nevertheless he smiled and felt himself warm, sore and content.

__x__

**I really hope y’all appreciate my dedication to accuracy that led me to research fucking Vaseline and see if it was named as such in the 1920’s (actually it’s been around since the 1870’s – fascinating eh? :-)**

**I absolutely promise that in the next chapter I will write at least a little of that thing that is plot! Hopefully you’d didn’t mind the lack of it too much here!**


	9. Chapter 9

**Enjoy the ride! ;-)**

**July 1924**

The car was a source of incredible joy, and of the most seething contention. From the moment Thor got it on his eighteenth birthday Loki fell in love with it. His eyes went shiny in the glare of bright yellow and sparkling silver, jealousy reflected over and over in a labyrinth of windshields; it was a Duisenberg Model J convertible and he wanted it. It was a want tinged with fury at the knowledge that their parents would never have got _him_ something like that. It rankled bitterly and as such he alternated repeated assertions of how rubbish he thought it was with stealing it at every opportunity. It was not that Thor had not offered to share or that Loki had anywhere he especially wanted to go – it was simply that it was not his and this was inexcusable.  

And so it was many the morning that Thor would wake to find Loki gone from his bed and the car gone from the garage. One day in late July, as he stood just outside in the drive, sighing and glaring at the space the car should have been in, there came a screech of tyre and he had to jump violently aside to avoid being run over as the car shrieked to halt just beside him in a tearing scream of yellow, coughing up clouds of angry dust as the brakes were pulled punishingly tight.

“Get in!” Loki yelled, laughing, eyes dancing with merriment and the thrill of high speed.

“ _You_ – get out!” Thor countered, opening the driver’s door and looking at him expectantly. Loki hauled the door closed again and all but kicked open the other, on the passenger side.

“Get in,” he repeated, weary and with a tolerant sigh, rolling his eyes as though Thor were being tedious and stupid – “Imbecile,” he muttered under his breath as Thor gradually went round and got in.

“Loki –” he began, with a strained, measured attempt at patience – “You cannot –” Loki flashed him a sharp, gleaming grin and kicked the car into a sickening lurch, wheeling a nauseating circle around the drive and headed them back out the front gate, wheels and Thor’s heart screaming.

Loki at sixteen; a beautiful, arrogant, unpredictable maelstrom, alternating rapidly - and often in the course of a day or even an hour - between serene, sarcastic, furious, demented – to name but a few possible changes. Not to mention, as Thor was coming to realise – dangerous. Loving him as much as ever, it was a ride Thor was forced to weather out.

The changes had written themselves across Loki’s face; his eyes seemed always a second away from breaking out in amusement, genuine or forced, tears or viciousness. Watchful and alert, nothing got past him now, he noticed everything. Likewise those lips could twist from a sneer into a smile of utter radiance within the space of a kiss. He could hide nothing from Thor, for all he feigned to the rest of the world. Thor saw every shiver in his hands, in the tensed knuckles of anger or in the fingers, as now, curled loose and slender around the steering wheel.

“Loki!” Thor tried to yell above the thunder of the wheels and the wind in their ears – “Can you please –” he gave up; if Loki could even hear a word he was not listening to it anyway. His head was thrown back, hair whipping in the wind, eyes bright, colour for once in those pale cheeks, roses in the snow. Thor could see teeth in his smile and to his alarm Loki’s eyes were half closed in the bliss that had to feel like flying. Thor had a nervous hand so ready to take the wheel that it brushed Loki’s. Loki spat and brushed Thor’s hand away. Thor cursed and screamed at him to _slow the fuck down._ Loki’s lips pulled back and he stepped on the accelerator.

They clattered over the bridge, wind rushing, Loki ecstatic in furious pleasure, screeching through the valley of ashes like an enchanted wind themselves, kicking up a cloud that settled back slowly on the street urchins who ran in their wake. Where the road met the train line Loki slammed the car to another gut-lurching halt and tapped his fingers on the wheel patiently, blissfully not meeting Thor’s furious glare and smiling in the face of his fury. He finally turned to him benignly when Thor paused in his raging outpour regarding Loki’s irresponsibility to arch his eyebrows –

“You done?”

“No I am not done –” before he could launch on again Loki shrugged expansively – “Well that’s a shame, cause I see your mouth move but all I can hear is blah blah blah.”

Thor growled low and Loki looked away and down at his watch.

“Just a couple of minutes now – this is _brilliant!”_

“What’s brilli –”

Loki kicked the car into gear before Thor could finish, hurtling them back into that rattling roar and just as they reached top speed a train bearing coal shot alongside them like an earthquake, running down the line beside the road. The sheer noise and thunder of it – Thor was certain they were going to die while Loki whooped and shrieked at the top of his lungs, all sound swallowed by the rush of the train, coal dust drifting across them all and the stench of it almost impossible to breath past. Loki’s exhilaration had barely lessened by the time the car screeched to a halt half a mile down the road, sputtering out a pained howling noise and the smell of something foul coming up from the engine.

“You asshole!” Thor exploded, storming out of the car to take a look, Loki hopping out nimbly and standing beside the car placidly, a smile on his face like he was still on cloud nine. He watched Thor with curious amusement as he bent over the bonnet and tried to work out what was wrong, after a little while of this he started offering up comments in a cool unhelpful stream –

“You’re doing it all wrong you know – ooh no not that bit – I really think you’re making it worse – oh no you definitely shouldn’t have done that – oh look now it’s leaking –”

Thor looked up at Loki under narrowing eyes, car oil dripping down his arms, to growl out –

“I swear I am going to kill you, Loki.”

“Oh but you can’t. Who’d go and ask Wilson to come fix the car if you killed me?”

“Ask who?”

“Wilson. He owns the garage just over the road. I always go to him when this hunk of junk gives out.”

“Jesus Loki – how many times have you –”

But before he could finish the question Loki was already half way across the road, nimbly weaving between the cars as though he thought himself immortal.

Wilson, it turned out was a thin, suspicious faced man whom Thor did not trust for one moment. He stood for several minutes watching him work with the car until Loki poked him in the ribs and muttered to him to follow him. He did not want to follow Loki right now, but again he was heading away from him before he had time to object. He followed Loki down a dingy side street and through a door almost entirely concealed by the bins outside. When he stepped inside he saw Loki in the process of concluding his conversation with the man behind the bar, taking some keys and heading up the narrow, shadowed stairway.

Finally on the landing Thor caught up to him, grabbed him by the arm, smearing oil over his skin and the gleaming green shirt;

“That’s it!” he exploded, pushing Loki against a wall that shuddered like paper – “You are never taking my car again!”

“Ugh –” Loki sniffed – “Like I _care. Fuck_ the car – get your hands off me, you’re filthy.”

“You want me to stop, Loki?” Thor grabbed Loki’s other arm and slid his black, oily hands all over, down to his wrists, pushing up under his shirt, over his chest and around his back.

“Stop it,” Loki tried to object, tried to be simply disgusted at the smear and slide of car oil on his skin, the smell of it reeking from Thor’s hands – “Don’t touch me. You’re disgusting.”

Thor quit giving Loki any more chances to pretend, rubbing his erection hard through his trousers, grinding up against him, wanting him now, however much he hated him at this moment.

“Wait –” Loki gasped, jabbing Thor sharp in the ribs with the clunky iron key in his hand. It stopped Thor long enough for Loki to find the right door and open it by which time the pain from the jab had angered him to pushing Loki through the door and slamming it behind them.

“I fucking hate you Loki,” he growled, grabbing him again and ripping with coarse hands at his clothes until they were off, the shirt hanging in tatters from his shoulders, pushing him down on the rickety bed that creaked and jerked, hands brutal on Loki’s skin, watching as his fingers painted dirty black steaks across that perfect pale canvas and Loki, for all his struggles, loving it.

“But you want me,” he sighed back, more a question than he would have liked, eyes bright and searching Thor’s – “Tell me you want me, brother.”

There was such neediness in Loki’s voice, such uncertainty in his dark, shining eyes; a tremble in the plea that made the brash arrogant young man he was becoming straight back into a child. Thor fell for it hard and fast as he always did, for the umpteenth time he forgave Loki everything, for the umpteenth time he melted as only Loki could make him melt.

“I want you Loki,” he said in a gentle growl, wrenching off his own clothes, one hand stroking Loki’s eager cock – “Fuck, I want you so much –”

Loki looked up at Thor’s nakedness emerging above him, rippled with muscle, face smudged, hands black and filthy and he wanted every inch of the golden perfection, wanted to know that this, this one gorgeous thing was all for him. He reached for it with clinging arms, reaching to dig his fingers into Thor’s shoulders and draw him down –

“Mine,” he asserted, and then, almost in a whimper – “Mine, brother please –”

“Yours,” Thor assured, nudging Loki’s legs apart with one hand, cock held in the other. He brushed between Loki’s legs to find him already prepared – “All yours,” he repeated and impaled him in a quick brutal thrust – “ – fuck” he added, teeth clenched in fierce pleasure, Loki clutching, scratching his nails to rip the skin down his back, the pain making him ram in harder just as Loki wanted, Loki speechless but the every angle of his body screaming for more, legs twisting around his back, pulling him in always deeper, biting with sharp little teeth into Thor’s shoulder when he rammed him almost harder than he could take but still not as hard as his soul demanded.

Loki gasped out words that could not be kept down though he could barely breathe beneath the pounding his body was taking, let alone speak, a litany, a mantra – _fuck me, brother, fuck me, ruin me, destroy me, tear me apart, more more more –_ until he was screaming to the heavens, Thor unable not to always do what Loki wanted whether it broke them both or not, not even needing to touch Loki’s cock before he was coming, screaming, shrieking in relief for being able to scream, louder in this filthy bed than he could ever be at home. Thor realised that he could follow this lead and roared his relief as he came into Loki, to rattle the rusty headboard and compete with the trains thundering by outside.

When he withdrew and fell onto the bed beside Loki he feared he would break it. Through the buzzing hum in his head he saw Loki’s eyes close and the deepest sigh heave out of him as though something bad and black inside him had been expelled in the screaming. As though for all the grease marks and the streaks across his skin he was washed cleaner on the inside than he had been before.

“You –” Thor panted, wanting to be angry but no longer able – “You – planned this, didn’t you?”

Loki grinned at him blissfully, snuggling his head in against Thor’s chest and dragging a large arm around to hold him;

“Of course I did. I even have a spare shirt.” He smiled again, so angelically that Thor could do nothing more than groan and haul him into the circle of his arms –

“Come here,” he growled and Loki came, so willingly he could have been a child again.

“But –” Thor added – “You’re still not driving my car again – I swear to god you’ll kill someone one of these days.”

“Meh,” Loki shrugged. Thor sighed and squeezed him tighter, as if by holding him tightly enough he could keep him safe always, even from himself.

“What am I going to do with you?”

Loki smirked and whispered several suggestions in his ear. By the time they finally returned to the car, Loki heading almost meekly to the side door, it was long since fixed, Wilson in a drunken faint in a battered chair beside the road.

**__x__**

**So, obviously I researched what kind of car Gatsby had so Thor could have the same and it was tricky – he has a different one in the book from either of the film versions – however since the book version was cream coloured I went for the 2013 film version which is the yellow Duisenberg because I like the idea of the yellow better, representing money and status more garishly than the cream, even though the car used in that film is a 1929 model and the year is 1924 both in the film and at this stage in my story. I apologise for the anachronism – but really it’s Baz Luhrman’s fault not mine. :-)**

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Warning: Could be read as dub con I guess but it’s really really not, I mean it looks like rape but it’s not, it’s consensual non – consent - essentially Loki’s developed a rape kink and if you don’t like it don’t read it!**

**Normal service will (probably) resume in the next chapter, basically feel free to skip!**

**September 1925**.

 

Sunlight trickled through strange leaves, spattering the mottled marble with shivering, rustling patterns. Loki held his arm out into the patterns and watched them play across his skin – shadow and gold as though he was a part of the marble. Although not quite – for despite all his best efforts he was actually getting a tan; Thor had been teasing him about it mercilessly for weeks now and he was finally coming to see the truth of it.

Thor, the dear idiot and insufferable oaf, had – and even Loki had to grudgingly admit that it was working – found a way to beat the September blues. He had in all his brilliance - and he really was unbearably proud of this - succeeded in banishing the month for good. As such, for the second year running, they had left, half way through august, for the French Riviera, not to return until mid October when the saddest season was well and truly past.

Loki had grumbled when Thor had first suggested the idea. He equated it with something their parents and their parents “Kind of people” did. Needless to say the fact that their parents did nothing but approve the suggestion whole heartedly only made Loki’s complaints the more vociferous, especially after hearing their father say how good it would be for them, how much they needed to get out more in society.

“I’m just trying to help,” Thor had protested, as Loki snuggled into him in the dark, protesting against everything he could at the same time, his grumbles becoming more and more ineffectual against Thor’s good hearted insistence until:

“Promise me we don’t have to “Get out more in society,”” He performed an admirable interpretation of their father’s most pretentious voice.

“I promise.”

And Loki had agreed. Now, one year later, he found himself adopting this new country as his own, at home amongst the vines and the fruit trees, the sparkling illusion of blue that was the Mediterranean as he had never been in New York. Within a week of their first visit he had already made Thor promise him that they would move out here one day and never leave.  

_As_ for the society he had so desperately tried to avoid, Thor cleverly kept him out of it so much that it was only ever on Loki’s insistence that they ever went out. And he did find himself insisting more than he ever expected he would. He felt an affinity to the Europeans he had never felt back home, a sense of belonging that made every one of his everyday grumbles less troublesome than they would normally have been. It was all so delightfully polished, so honestly fake – as though the people here had grown up in these shimmering costumes and nothing else. It made the social elite of West Egg look like a group of monkeys squeezed into suits. As such he found himself happy dividing his time – if not fairly than at least a little – between himself and others.

They became long days of extended summer, lounging in the shade in the heat of the day, walking along the beach or the promenade in the evening, now and then venturing out into the countryside in hired cars or on horses as the mood took, finding quiet corners of the countryside where Loki could curl up for a day beneath a tree with a book while Thor persistently, aggravatingly and delightfully distracted him.

And away from their parents circle of awareness there were new freedoms to be always explored. Loki found himself growing beneath these freedoms as though he had been stunted his whole life.

To avoid suspicion they had separate hotel rooms, but because the need for suspicion was one they were not willing to change they had booked rooms next to one another with shared balcony and interconnecting lounge area. It was their habit, therefore, to walk around these rooms, during the hottest parts of the day, often without a hint of clothing, unabashedly swinging in and out of one another’s peripheral vision.

One such afternoon found Thor, stretched naked across Loki’s bed, idly stroking his cock for some while in the hope that Loki would notice and get the hint. Loki, stretched likewise across the sofa, was intent upon stubbornly not noticing until the point where Thor’s need became less idle.

“Loki!” he called lazily. “Loki come here. I need you.”

Loki smirked, knowing that voice well enough, and made every appearance of fixing his eyes firmly on the book in his hands, knowing that it would not take much to make Thor in this mood as impatient and angry as Loki would like him.

“ _Loki,”_ Thor growled impatiently, more than a hint of warning in his voice. Loki yawned showily and within moments Thor was on his feet and prowling towards him with predatory, dangerous intent. Loki watched only out of the corner of his eye, doing his best not to even show his own breathing quicken, wanting, more than anything, to goad Thor into hurting him as much as he was coming to love.

It had been a long time and a lot of work on Loki’s part to convince Thor it really was alright to hurt him in these scenarios, and more difficult still when he discovered he really liked it when he could say _no_ and Thor would not listen and continue anyway. They had argued about it extensively, Thor always coming back to how he did not want Loki hating him or thinking that he was hated himself, did not want him to think he deserved the pain or indeed to cause him any real harm. It had troubled him that there _was_ a large enough part of himself that enjoyed the idea and Loki had finally convinced him that this did not make him the terrible person he was afraid of being, certainly not when it was so compatible with what Loki wanted himself.

Finally they had come to an agreement: that Thor would give Loki exactly what he wanted (this was always, after all, a part of every agreement they came to and in return they would agree on a safe word that Loki would promise to use if he genuinely wanted Thor to stop. They had laughingly picked their father’s name as the one thing they both agreed would absolutely put them off anything they were planning anyway.

And so Loki smiled sweetly and his heart sang as he put his book down and let Thor wrestle him off the sofa, putting up a fight that they both knew was only a tenth of what he could have really given back. Finally Thor gave a hiss of victory at having Loki’s nakedness pinned helpless beneath him, twisting and kicking. Thor slammed his back into the floor –

“Get used to it, little brother –” he snarled – “’Cause this is gonna happen whether you like it or not. I’ll beat you, I’ll rape you Loki – again and again until I’ve had enough. You’ll scream –” Thor tensed in pleasure at the thought, “– and you’ll make me come –” Loki shook his head, forcing himself to whimper when his heart and cock were singing in delight - and Thor slapped him hard across the face. “You’ll make me come _so hard,_ little fuck toy –” he manhandled Loki punishingly over his knee and kneaded his perfect little ass delightedly – “You need warming up,” he murmured, smirking, and taking up the book Loki had discarded, beat that quivering, suffering little bottom with it until the skin turned purple and Loki’s wails were only half in pretence.

“Good,” Thor snapped, throwing Loki back mercilessly onto his back,  smirking to hear him cry out at the slam of the floor upon his tortured ass – “Much better,” he spat into Loki’s tear streaked face and rubbed his aching, enormous cock against the already well prepared hole. Loki whimpered wretchedly, trying with no wish of succeeding to wriggle away as Thor held him in a merciless, vice like grip –

“You want this Loki,” he snarled – “You need this. You’re gonna take my dick in you like a good boy – _yes –”_ he insisted as Loki whimpered. “Yes Loki, you’re gonna take so much dick, I’ll ram you, break you, come into you, oh Loki I’ll pour my lovely come into you until there’s not another drop in my balls and you’ll be used and crying and I’ll have had a nice fuck. A nice fuck and a good come – now –”

And he surged forward, shoving the head of his cock into Loki’s tiny hole and Loki screamed-

“No! Please no –” trying to make it sound like he meant it and failing abysmally, delighted to find there was nothing he could do against all that muscle and strength and Thor shivering in bliss to hear him beg so desperately;

“Yeah –” Thor hissed cruelly – “So _good –”_ he forced his cock further in with sadistic savagery, – “Yes, you cry Loki, cry little brother – so good, so fucking good – fuck I enjoy hurting you Loki –god –”

The ability to speak faded into slamming into Loki’s shaking body with feral savagery, Loki’s tears and incoherent screams spurring him to greater heights of animal lust. He wanted to draw it out for as long as he could, make him cry and feel all that he could give him for as long as he can but it felt too good and it was not long at all before he was coming furiously and brutally, pouring a seemingly endless stream of hot seed into that small sobbing form. And yet the very act aroused him, and he was delighted to find that when he stopped coming into Loki he was still hard as hell and continuing to rut into Loki, as helpless not to as Loki would have been to escape him, if he had ever genuinely tried.

Loki’s eyes grew wide and he whined piteously to feel Thor thrust into him again, battering his tenderised body with his brutal, obscene cock–

“No, please,” – he moaned. “Please no more –”

“Yes,” Thor grinned, delirious with pleasure – “Lots more Loki, lots more hot come in your tiny little body, lots more hot cock raping you, oh Loki you are _so_ small, so helpless – come on –”

He moved onto his knees, hauling Loki with him, never giving him a moment when he was not impaled on his massive cock, sinking into him more easily now, his own come spilling out over his cock as he fucked into Loki ceaselessly –

“Get in my lap, little brother.”

He held Loki tight to stop him wriggling, moving him up and down on his cock to his liking, slapping his face back and forth to watch the red flare up in those pale cheeks and Loki’s eyes swim, black and almost swooning in ecstasy.

He roared curses into the calm afternoon, cupping Loki’s ass in both hands, to hold him firmly in place and pound him savagely, snarling his abuse through gritted teeth.

“Such a good fuck little brother, so _good_ Loki, so good, fuck, you take my dick, take it you whore, fuck yeah you cry Loki, sob for me, I’ll hurt you Loki, I’ll fucking hurt you ‘til you come –”

“Brute –” Loki groaned, cock throbbing, screaming at him, seconds from coming – “Filthy rapist monster –”

“Yeah Loki, I’m a monster – now you come for your monster, come when your big brother fucks you, come all over my cock little brother –”

And much as he hated doing what he was told, Loki did, collapsed in Thor’ lap, utterly impaled, screaming Thor’s name into his neck, hands tangled hard in his hair, coming in crashing waves that took Thor with him again and he all but collapsed in a messy heap in Thor’s arms.

When Thor found his legs he carried Loki over to the bed and, kissing every bruise he had made, took him again, this time tenderly and with whispered promises pressed into every burning inch of skin. They twisted together on the bed, tangled up together in a sweet indestructible, insatiable knot of limbs and afterwards Loki purred sleepily, half dozing as Thor sweetened every hurt he had made with cooling oil rubbed in more gently than Loki would have said he could manage. As he drifted into a light sleep Thor whispered an oft repeated truth into his ear and Loki smiled and rested in the arms that cradled him like a hammock, in this one rare moment free from any desire, fear or the faintest of concerns.

The sun trickled like honey across the cooling forms on the bed as they dozed away the hottest part of the day until the breezes came up off the sea, calling them down to the shore.

__x__

 

**This was going to be plotty :-( ….then porns happened. I feel quite sad that the innocent stage is well over now but after all it never can last forever….now Loki’s getting all my kinks! I hope I don’t need to clarify again that this _was_ entirely consensual. :-)**

 

 

 

 


	11. Chapter 11

**11.**

In the winter of that year they returned from the Riviera on the back of a wind that spelled change. It whispered it up against the walls of the mansion, creeping new ideas in with the flurries of snow off the sound.  Loki could almost hear that wind whispering to him, calling him away, and he felt himself pulled on it like a last leaf clinging to the tree.

 

He could all but see the wind whisper colours of suspicion into their father’s ear, saw the way he watched them now with a troubled frown that had not been there before. On top of this he saw him take Thor more and more often aside, and when he asked Thor about this, was told that he was trying to as he saw it _prepare_ and as Thor saw it _persuade_ him into taking a more active part in running the family business. Needless to say the fact that Loki had no interest whatsoever in business himself did not prevent him from getting jealous at their father’s automatic assumption that he was not interest and what Loki could only see as an obvious intention to pass it on to Thor and Thor alone. Again it did not matter to Loki that _Thor_ was no more interested than he was; he blamed him at least half the time for this nonetheless.

 

As the snows piled up outside the wrought iron and silver gates – they had been shipped over here long ago, their father side, from a castle in Switzerland – Loki could be found – or more often than not, could _not_ be found – taking long walks through the grounds in the coldest of weathers, frustrated that in this weather the car was out of commission.

 

Thor found himself becoming more and more concerned whenever he looked for Loki and his brother was not to be found. He suspected that this level of dependence was not good but he could not stop it and did not entirely care – what concerned him more, when he allowed himself to trouble over it, was that it was a dependence Loki did not share.

 

On one such day Thor had searched the house, top to bottom, and was on his way out into the grounds, wrapped up tight against the cold when he heard his parent’s voices from behind a door he suspected they had meant to close. His mother –

 

“Honestly dear this isn’t the eighteen hundreds – you can’t just _marry them off.”_

 

“Damn well wish it was.”

 

“Besides they’re only children.”

 

“Thor’s twenty now – that’s old enough.”

 

“He’s nineteen and _anyway_ \- first you want to start him in business, now you want to marry him off! Honestly Odin what are you so worried about?”

 

“There’s something odd about those two – always in each other’s pockets – I don’t like it – it’s not right. They should be getting out more. Going to parties. Seeing girls. You’d think they were married to each other.“

 

“Oh for goodness sake! Now listen, I have a better idea –”

 

His mother’s voice went too quiet for Thor to hear what she said next, but after a short while with his breath held he heard his father’s voice –

 

“For Thor maybe, Loki – I don’t know Frigga, I just don’t understand that boy. To tell you the truth I sometimes wonder why we –”

 

Thor’s held breath chose that ill – timed moment to let itself out and when it did it was louder than he meant it to be, almost like a groan, from the effort of staying still so long. His father broke off –

 

“Is someone there?” – and Thor dashed out the door before there was any chance for him to come and look.

 

He walked across the drive and took a turn down onto the lawn, the snow lay thinly and crunched like flimsy crystals beneath his great feet. He silently cursed his lack of stealth that would alert Loki of his coming from doubtless miles away. He wanted to call for him but knew from experience that this would probably make him move away, just to be difficult. All the same he could not stop his heart from calling Loki’s name; and it did it so loudly he was sure he would hear even that. All the while he pondered and fretted over what he had heard; how much did their father suspect? What had their mother suggested? Most of all his father’s last words haunted him – _I wonder why we –_ what? What could he have been going to say? He wondered – he had wondered for some time if their mother didn’t actually know everything and had been quietly covering them for years. He wondered – as he had not wondered before – how strange they really were –were they so very out of the ordinary? He did not know; he had had little real contact with other people and had never much sought it, instead choosing – if it really was a choice - to wrap his entire existence up in Loki. He had not wanted it any other way. He still did not.

 

Above all he wondered how much of what he had overheard he should share with Loki.

 

It was just on this – this awkward thought – that he found him. He was sat on a small wall with no purpose on the edge of the trees in the sunlight. It was bright off the snow and off Loki’s skin, refracting almost as much colour as the white. He was a curious, colourful thing in this white landscape, in the dull green coat with the fur that Thor rather suspected was meant more for ladies; watching his breath, frosty on the air with that thoughtful faraway face he was starting to see more and more these days.

 

As he stood for a moment, trying  to gauge Loki’s mood, Loki turned to him and frowned –

 

“What’s the matter?”

 

Thor pushed his hands into his pockets, wishing he had remembered gloves.

 

“What do you mean?” It came out guilty. Loki smirked;

 

“Oh come on –” Thor crunched his way over to sit opposite Loki on the wall “You’re terrible at not telling. Something’s up. Something –” He frowned and Thor got that strange sense that came over him a lot – that Loki was reading him in a way other people could not – “What did you hear?”

 

It was uncanny. But Thor knew he could not deny it when Loki did this.

 

“I _did_ hear something.” He looked down at the silvery ice patterns across the stone.

 

“I know. Tell me.”

 

“Loki –”

 

“I can take it. Quit fucking about.”

 

Thor sighed;

 

“Father suspects something –”

 

“That’ll be a first – doesn’t that require a brain?”

 

“ _Loki –_ this could be bad.”

 

“Why?”

 

“I think he wants us to – see – girls – he was saying something about how we should marry –”

 

Loki laughed, not quite humourlessly –

 

“Yeah. Good luck with that. “ He squinted into Thor’s face – “You’re not going to – are you?”

 

“No of course not – but –”

 

“No.” Loki affirmed, a little fiercely – “You’re not.”

 

“Well what do you suggest?” Thor said, a little irritated by Loki’s stubborn ferocity and apparent obliviousness to his concerns – “Would you have me marry you?”

 

The concept was so impossible, so deeply to be desired that it came out of Thor’s mouth meaner and more sarcastic than he even faintly meant. Loki’s eyes narrowed –

 

“Right now I’m thinking no,” he said coldly, looking away sharply to swallow a painful hitch in the throat, a little panic taking hold of his heart like a bothersome beast –

 

“I’m sorry,” he amended quickly, too quickly for his own liking, a need in his voice that hurt them both – “I would. You know I would.”

 

Thor took hold of the hand, resting on the wall beside him, taking it fiercely in his own and finding it to be somehow, almost magically warm in the cold. He shuffled a little closer, reaching a hand up to Loki’s neck, warmed again by his skin and the soft fur of his collar. He looked up, finally, to meet Loki’s eye –

 

“So would I,” he sighed – “I’ve never wanted anybody else. I never could. But mother –”

 

“She knows,” Loki waved that away dismissively – “She’s known for ages.”

 

“She told you that?”

 

“She didn’t have to.”

 

“I think – she’s trying to talk him out of it.”

 

“Out of – what – exactly?”

 

“Everything –” he scooped Loki to him, but with all the layers of clothing it was a little like trying to hug  a peacock with the tail outspread – “It will be alright Loki, nothing’s going to change.”

 

“Oh _Thor –”_ Loki sighed, affectionately, wishing it was true, hugging back a little as though Thor- however larger than himself he was – were a child. “You big idiot.” He did not say it out loud but Thor heard the thought as though he had, the correction, strong in Loki’s mind and fatal –

 

_Everything’s going to change._

Somewhere between the sun and the snow they kissed with the sea smiling on the horizon. Then, when finally they went back up to the house it was to their mother telling them that they were going travelling, leaving the house to them, just the two of them for the next two years.

 

__x__

 

**Eeeee I thought this chapter was gonna go sad but thank god for Frigga!**


	12. Chapter 12

**12.**

When news comes that seems too good to be true, there are two, distinctly different, ways in which the news can be taken. One is to mistrust it and to watch it warily for the hidden catch, the other is to embrace it whole heartedly and revel in the good fortune. Loki and Thor now perfectly illustrated each opposing reaction. In the face of their parents’ announcement they both remained quietly pleased, smiling, giving polite thanks and assurance that the house would be standing when their parents returned and that there would be no party held that was larger than it was accustomed to.

This latter part, however, seemed like it would be unlikely to be doable even had they tried and to Loki’s suspicion especially their father seemed to not entirely insist forcibly upon this point.

“It’s a trap,” he said that night, almost the instant he hauled himself in through Thor’s window – even now that they were nearly grown – or perhaps especially now they were careful to avoid being seen going into each other’s rooms at night.

“That’s ridiculous,” Thor countered – he had been awaiting this – “How could it be a trap?”

“Anyway it’s not good.”

“It’s brilliant!”

“Urgh, Thor you are so thick!” Loki would have yelled but for fear of waking their parents it came out more in a hiss – “Why would they do this – just after you hear them talking about how we need to grow up and all the rest of it – it’s a test, a trap, or a consolation for something terrible they’re going to do when they get back.”

Thor yelled quietly in response –

“You drive me up the wall Loki! Why can’t you – just for once – enjoy and accept what you’re given instead of always worrying what the catch is? Why can’t you Just. Be. Happy!”

“God, I can’t talk to you, you’re –”

“You can talk to me any time!”

“You’re such a fucking moron.”

“You’re an annoying little shit.”

“Bite me.”

Thor did, and as with almost all their fights in these days this one ended in laughter, quickly stifled in sighs and gasps and screams muffled frantically into the pillow.

“Said I couldn’t talk to you,” Loki murmured smugly, almost happily, leaning back against the headboard, idly stroking the arm wrapped around him with one finger.

“Loki?"

“Hmm?”

“Don’t you ever think positively about the future?”

“I don’t like it.”

“Thinking positively?”

“The _future_ dick head. It can’t – it just _can’t_ stay good forever.”

“Did you never just make normal boring plans?”

 “I guess  - I used to think about college. Studying science , you know, travelling to the moon like in HG Wells – but then –”

“Then what?”

“Well you’re so dumb you’d never come with me and I don’t –” Loki bit his lip.

“You don’t want to be apart from me?”

“Oh shut up.” Thor smiled at Loki’s way of saying _yes._

“So you wouldn’t go away to college but you’d go to the moon?”

“Moon’s not so far,” Loki yawned, reaching out with his hand to hold the moon between his fingers like he had always amused Thor by doing when they were little – “See?”

“I love you, Loki.”

“Love you, dumb ass.”

 

__x__

 

The day their parents left for Europe, The brothers waved them off and the second the car was gone from view they turned to each other and grinned –

“Let’s drive them mad and _not party_ wildly!” Loki grinned. Thor high fived him and they ran back into the house yelling at the tops of their voices. They carried these streams of sounds like tumbling ribbons throughout the house, hurtling through it and claiming the place at a volume never before permissible, stopping just outside their parents bedroom where Loki turned to grin at Thor, a mad wild fire in his eyes –

“Shall we –“ he began slowly, hoping that Thor would get it and follow him straight away.

“What?” Thor frowned. Loki sighed –

“Shall we go fuck on their bed?” In spite of Thor’s denseness he could not help but grin with amusement at his own suggestion and to his relief, he was far quicker in following him in and doing exactly that than he was at getting a hint.

 

__x__

 

 “It’s just us now Loki –” Thor breathed as they finished, his body singing in pleasure as he sank down, still pressing Loki tight between him and the bed – “ They’re gone – for two years  - just think of all we could do –“

He ran his rough and tingling hands up and down Loki’s sides, kneeling up to flip his little brother over on his back, gaze down at that sweet sleepy face and palm his shamefully hard cock, already stiffening again at the sight of that beauty , observing quickly that Loki was no more finished than he was –

“Oh Loki –” he sneered – “You sick little bastard, getting all hard for _your own brother._ Dirty, filthy thing I’m going to have such a good time punishing you, fucking you Loki – over and over again”

“No –” Loki whined, loving the sound of his own lies, knowing how Thor loved to hear it – “Please brother no –”

“Fuck, Loki –” Thor’s cock jerked back to life and he slapped Loki in the face as he pushed it against him – “You know just how to make me hard you little shit – I’m gonna fuck you Loki, every day, and you can scream all you want there’ll be no-one to hear you – no-one to help you, just my cock getting harder the more you scream and beg me to stop  - fuck Loki I love it when you beg me to stop – and for now Loki –” he pushed his cock slowly back into his little brother, his hole slick and sweetened with Thor’s own come –

“For now I’m going to breed you, over and over Loki, until these sheets are so wet with my come you have no choice but to come to my bed so I can do it to you again–”

He pounded into Loki as he talked, ravaging that little body, which took it nonetheless, with increasingly brutal thrusts -

“Maybe I’ll keep you tied there – day and night, hmm Loki? Use you when I want, abuse you, rape you, come in you until you’re dripping with it, keep you as my own little fuck toy – fuck Loki –”

He groaned to feel Loki clenching around his cock, tight and fluttering with ecstasy at Thor’s words, so tight Thor had to force himself in hard to not be pushed out, grinding down into Loki’s body mercilessly. Loki screamed and scrabbled to get away just a little to ease the agony of being so incredibly full. The struggles and the screams just aroused Thor further, made him lust all the more violently after his own pleasure and Loki’s whimpers, ramming into him furiously until he could hear Loki’s sighs that suggested he was close to completion. On that sound he pulled out, nudging his monstrous cock into Loki, just enough to torment but never quite satisfy, waiting until Loki whimpered and tried to push himself down on it. Thor pulled away and slapped him –

“Beg,”, he insisted, giving him nothing until Loki could no longer hide a sob of frustration;

“Please –” he whimpers brokenly

“Aww – please what, Loki, come on use your words like I know you can you little liar, tell me what you want from your big brother.”

Loki gritted his teeth for all the seconds that he could until he let out a sobbed stream of choked pleas –

“Your cock, Thor give me your fucking cock!”

“Now that is not asking nicely!”

“Please Thor please!” Loki sobbed, “Fuck your little brother, give me that huge cock, use me use me please, come all over me, fill me up –”

“You want this big hard cock –”

“Yes -  please –”

“Say it!”

“Please I want your big hard cock – ram it in me, force me, break me with it please –”

It was enough, Thor slammed back into him with a roar of pleasure and relief, after the murderous frustration it was enough to have Loki screaming within seconds, screeching at the top of his lungs for ecstasy and simply because he could. It was beyond catharsis, beyond release simply to yell because one _could_ and Thor as he came just behind, roared with him to rock the house for the second time with the thunder of their delight, falling beneath it and into the saturated sheets.

“Fuck Loki - ” he sighed, purring low in in Loki’s ear as he whimpered,  mewling in well-acted distress and trying to hide his face in the pillow -

“I fucked you twice little brother,” Thor snarls – “I filled you up with my come and you may as well get used to it because it’s going to keep happening. Every day Loki, I will fuck you, I will use you – use you for my pleasure again and again whenever I want however I want – look at me –”

He snarled again, yanking Loki’s head up from the pillow, twisting him by the hair to make him look at him, swallowing hard at the sight of his brother’s lovely face, his angry but lust blown eyes and the silvery tear tracks down his face – “God Loki –” he breathed, almost tenderly brushing away his tears –“Look at you, so gorgeous – god what you do to me Loki – you make me so hard, make  my balls so full of come,  I just gotta put it in your mouth Loki – fuck - lick me clean –”

Loki smirked through his fighting as Thor wrestled him down the bed until he could push his stiffening, sticky cock against those beautiful lips. Loki stubbornly clamped his lips together, not moving when Thor pushed his cock against them violently;

“Yeah that’s it, suck it Loki, suck it well, make me come, make your big brother come –”

Loki whimpered pitifully around the fat cock filling his mouth and when his tears fell right on to his brother’s dick Thor almost came in that instant, little better than those tears of suffering falling on a swollen erection forced into that unwilling mouth. He forced himself to hold on, to hold Loki painfully by the hair and force his cock deep into his throat until Loki’s eyes streamed and his throat gasped;

Loki’s choking, struggling throat sucked the come straight from Thor’s cock and he pulled Loki’s hair viciously, spilling the hot seed into his mouth, forcing him to take it down, pulling out to splash the last of it all across the pretty little face. His softening cock twitched at the sight, indeed his whole body shuddered with lust –

“So lovely –” he sighed, truly tenderly  this time– “Oh Loki you should see yourself, see what I’ve done to you, how used you look, defiled and abused, my come all over you. Fuck Loki you’re being wasted if you don’t look like this every second of every day – all that come - this is what you’re for little brother, all for me – all for me – aren’t you Loki?”

Loki knew, he did not need proof of ownership marked across his skin to know that he belonged to Thor as Thor belonged to him. But just because he did not need it did not mean that he was not going to seek it out, and it certainly did not mean he was ever going to admit to something just because Thor wanted him to. So he said nothing, just to make Thor fuck it into him again. It worked better than any words or any scheme Thor could come up with to convince him just to enjoy their two years of freedom.

__x__

**So I wrote the first part of this a couple days ago but then my brain wasn’t working well enough today for anything more than a gratuitous fuck – fest.  I’m so sorry/ not sorry! Btw The HG Wells Loki was referring to was “First men on the moon” published 1901.**

**In other news my house is possibly going to actually get washed away in the current rain, two out of four rooms un-usable due to water coming in through the roof – needless to say we’re moving out and now have just over two weeks to transfer all of our everything to my mother- not – yet – quite in law’s house. So if updates are reeeaaaally slow for a bit I apologise hugely. I will try and get stuff done in between packing and emptying water buckets (I’m gonna have to write some I think – to stay sane!) but you’ll all understand I’m sure if updates are slower than should be! :-)**

**Sorry for the my – current – life – in a – nutshell update – but I’m feeling bad about how I’ve not written in days already!!**


	13. Chapter 13

 

 

  **13.**

Sometimes Loki wondered if there was something really wrong with him, some block in his brain that made him suspicious of anything that looked like good fortune, unable to “Just be happy” with happiness, as Thor was always telling him he should be on a varying scale of exasperation. Sometimes he wondered if it was not something wrong with him, but some strange sixth sense, a foresight, an uncanny ability to _know_ that things would go wrong. Thor called this pessimism when it did not lead to anything and “the funny feeling in the toes” when it did.

Sometimes Loki wondered if he was not just an idiot or a worrier at best, and an absolute asshole at worst. He wondered if it was possible to be all of these and so many more conflicting types of person all at once. In the end, after the first few months, he figured a crude summary could be made that he was a good enough person on the days they were alone together in which he did not go out in the car and a complete irrevocable little stinker on driving days and party days. In truth he felt rather proud of his own self summary, it came the closest he could find to learning who he was as he stampeded through the messy latter end of the growing up process.

If it had been up to Loki, there would have been no parties at all in the West Egg mansion for the whole two years their parents were away. But Thor talked and then – at least to Loki’s colourfully fractured viewpoint – bulldozed him into it. He insisted that it would look strange if all action in the house suddenly ceased, suspicious even. Loki’s argument that he could not give the faintest crap about how things looked to people who meant less than nothing to him held out until Thor suggested that he really ought, also, to at least pretend to have a girlfriend for the sake of appearances. All of a sudden parties were back on the menu and Loki so viciously asserted his insistence that Thor was _not_ getting a girlfriend, for appearances sake or any other reason that Thor could not sit down without grimacing for the best part of a week.

Once again the music blazed and the lights shone out, the house was alive with colour and noise half the nights of the week. The driveway filled up with the shining car of the rich and famous, spilling their cargo out across the lawns like sequins. The effluvia of dazzling human life splashing across the stairs leading into the house and twining through the gardens. The bands just appeared, the drink and the people – all it seemed, without invites or requests ever even being sent out.

As though Thor’s acquiescence to open the house up were rain to starved soil, it no sooner fell than the party growers rose up from the ground like worms. Loki found himself, more often than not, looking down on it all from a hidden height, seeing the nest of writhing rainbows twisting and gyrating through the main hall, swelling out into the open side rooms, out across the gardens, almost all the way down to the sea. Looking down they seemed so small, so inconsequential, and himself more superior and more distant than ever. Indeed the only thing he could not see clearly in the dazzle of the crowd was himself, as he walked through it, yet always above it. He could not see himself - at nineteen now, hair grown unfashionably long with nobody to stop him, dressing more and more in oily blacks and poisonous greens, a serpent slipping dangerously through this less than innocent Eden. Paler than ever beneath the brightest lights, his face was a mask of haughty disdain that made people eye him warily, more than often wondering who he was and what he was doing. He saw it; the constant questioning of his presence in his own house and it nurtured the tender seeds of hate in him into plants with roots that trailed when he walked, and vines he felt he could lash out to ensnare them all.

Only Thor knew that when Loki was not glaring cuttingly at it all, when he stood to one side near the dance floor, or the buffet table, in a corner of the garden perhaps,  smiling sweetly to himself – that this was the time people should truly be afraid. For it was under these circumstances that Loki would have set one of his own little games in motion. To while away the dull party house at the expense of what others felt constituted their entire lives. Loki’s “games” consisted of maybe a word whispered here and there, slipped in between hours of watching and studying, just to see with how little effort he could do the most damage. He told Thor he was prying the lid off the can of crawling humanity, exposing their fragility, trying to make more of them than a wriggling mass of bugs in glittering gowns.

These games were the only interest Loki could find in the necessity of  public appearance. He would see how long it took a rumour to catch on, how quickly he could cause a scandal with a simple lie. He had honed the art of crowd manipulation so that most of that season’s social elite would know that Lady So – and – so was cheating on her husband before the rumour even reached Lord so- and – so’s ears. He would spark this with a casual word in a stranger’s ear and silently wind his way around the party watching it spread. He would kick off the suggestion that Young so-and-so junior had made his money in bootlegging and watch the man get ruined by it behind his back as he loitered on a balcony with the newly discovered social group he was just about to lose. Whilst the acid lies danced their way through the bustling mansion, growing and becoming bloated beyond anything Loki ever needed to infer, he, the perpetrator, would stand by innocently and watch with an angel’s smile. But when the fight between Lord So and So and the poor shmuck Loki had designated his wife’s lover finally kicked off in the centre of the ball room, you could be sure he would be there, watching through dazzling narrowed eyes and smiling faintly over the rim of his glass.

It never ceased to amuse him how easily these people could be manipulated. How little the truth really mattered. Nobody was interested in a benign truth when they could enjoy the scandal of a harmful lie. Half the time they did not even ask the libelled party their side of the story. It did not matter; even if their innocence was uncovered, people would always remember the rumour and put out the vacuous assumption that it had to come from somewhere. Surely, as Loki wondered aloud to Thor when Thor saw through this little game and so predictably, so _boringly_ called him out on it – surely that made them all a hundred times worse than he was?

Thor did not see it. He did not see past the prettiness and the dazzle of the swirling lights. He did not see beyond his own mulish desire to find good in everyone and everything. They argued about it constantly, Thor always countering that he could not, on the contrary, understand Loki’s insistence on always seeing the bad. No argument would sway either from their stance and so it went on.

Beneath the gaiety and the legends that grew up of the West Egg mansion parties Loki’s revulsion and derision of it grew like a cluster of spider eggs concealed in silken stockings. So too it went un-noticed that Thor glittered at the circle of these gatherings more and more with the sparkle of alcohol in his eyes. In the after dark of these nights with the guests departed it became harder and harder to distinguish fighting from fucking, sex a constant argument and battle a mutual state of agreement.

This was the smaller half of every week; the days they spent with the house in silence were as sweetly delicious and compatible as the other days were fraught and laden with animosity. While they both wished every day could be the sweeter kind Thor felt himself doing the stronger thing in forcing public appearance. Loki never ceased to disagree.

And so it went on until, in the final months leading up to their parents’ return from Europe, the Odinson house grew silent. The windows grew dark and the music ceased. Even the sea seemed to hold its breath for a long and perfect moment of trembling.

Finally capitulating to Loki’s insistence that they at least take the last three months for themselves, giving nothing to anyone else, Thor agreed to stop all interaction with the outside world. Uneasy though it made him it was Loki’s idea of perfection. Loki, who had been uneasy almost constantly for almost two years, waiting in fear of judgement of some cataclysmic ending to this time they had together. In these last months Thor saw him blossom into such sweetness he was almost that child again, with the trusting smile and the open, if not quite honest eyes. He made Thor laugh again so much that he wondered why the front had ever been necessary, wished beyond measure they could have been like this the entire time.

“It couldn’t have been,” Loki shrugged when he voiced this wish – “If not for the parties, I would still – would still –”

“You could not have let yourself be happy if you did not know it had to end.” Thor sighed, saying, as had become his accepted wont – every truth Loki did not wish to utter. Loki smirked wryly, contented and melancholy all in one breath;

“Satisfaction’s not in my nature”.

Thor stroked the  tender cheek that turned from him a little, bringing Loki’s face back to his as easily as breathing again after a held breath. Loki smiled at the warmth in Thor’s eyes and saw that he had taken his words as a challenge.

“I’ll show you satisfaction,” Thor grinned.

And he did and it was perfect. It just never did last very long.

 

__x__

 

 

**I fear I am of a melancholy bent at this time. But I promise next chapter it’ll all get dramatic again! Gonna pick up the actual plot and everything!**

 

 

 


	14. Chapter 14

  **14**

**1928**

An ill wind off the Mediterranean blew their parents back to Long Island in the August of 1927, two and a half years from the time that they had left. Thor’s heart had been living in his mouth since the day they received news of the imminent return,  but to his surprise – and no lack of somewhat worried suspicion – Loki’s behaviour upon their arrival was more charming, indeed pleasant,  than he had ever known it to be.

 

At first it really did seem, as well, as though all of Loki’s fears and concerns of the past two years had been entirely unfounded. Their mother seemed genuinely delighted to see them again and even their father half smiled a grudging observation that they did not appear to have destroyed anything at least.

 

In truth they heard more about their parents own travels and their father’s health problems than had to answer questions about their own potential misdemeanours. Their father had developed sight problems over the past year but was taking it in good grace enough to not even be angry when Thor said the eye patch made him look like a pirate.

 

Once again they found themselves having to be careful, having to be quiet, Loki returning with apparent ease on his part to beginning almost every night as a green light just outside of Thor’s window; almost seeming to actually delight in the return to subterfuge and silence. For Thor it seemed so much harder to balance upon the tightrope between propriety and desire for having been able to loosen that rope over the past two years. Apart from that however, the early weeks of their parents return seemed to have been going better than either of them had faintly hoped.

 

Then it came; just over two weeks into their return Frigga and Odin gathered them together to drop the bombshell that Odin was taking Thor into the business with him and Loki was being sent away to college. No questions, just facts they were expected to accept.

 

Thor did _not_ accept it. He exploded on the spot, without so much as the briefest pause for thought. Not so much at learning the business – he had always grudgingly supposed he would have to one day – and certainly he made no attempt to hide his lack of interest or indeed the fact that he did not care enough even to know what manner of business his father was in. No, it was, as he saw it, Loki’s casual and callous banishment that he refused to accept or allow. He railed against it so hard and so loud that it was not until he turned to Loki for the support and the similar horror he felt sure would come that he noticed that Loki was sat still in his seat, barely reacting to the news in his own extraordinary sea of calm. Indeed, he was even smiling faintly, the sight of which made Thor pause in his ranting for surprise. He frowned;

“Loki?” It crossed his mind that Loki was simply in shock; he could not stop, right at that moment, to dislike himself for almost hoping this. He was simply floored with a feeling of terrible betrayal when Loki quite calmly asked them which university they had in mind. It occurred to Thor quicker than he wanted it to that they really were discussing this, in front of him, as though it was alright. As though Loki’s acceptance, even more than his parents decision, were not a terrible and unforgivable betrayal. Knowing he should not be thinking of it like this did not help. He simply _could not_ just sit there and listen to Loki being, for all the world and appearances, content, even interested in going away and leaving him. He made a furious inarticulate sound of disgust and stormed from the room like a whirlwind taking all the rain he felt building up inside with him.

 

It felt like hours that he paced, up and down the corridor, waiting for Loki to come out, not wanting to speak to him, wanting to speak to him terribly, to try and understand, wanting to either have been able to be an adult about things and stayed or to have really run off and ignored it all, wanting least of all to be pacing furiously in the family’s near vicinity unsure whether he was separate or involved in the drama that was unfolding, within and without. He stopped dead in the hallway. _Just like Loki said he had always been. Like he had always tried to explain._ It was horrible. More so knowing that Loki was always poised on this horrible confusing edge than being there right now itself. It was on the back of this sudden awful understanding that the door opened and Loki came out, looking cool as a breeze. Thor tried to ignore his ridiculously howling heart but could not keep the nervous tension and need – he hardly know what for – out of his eyes. Loki took one look at him and rolled his, opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, sighed in a manner Thor could not quite read and walked away quickly before he could move to follow.

 

As soon as Loki was out of sight, taking a side door out into the gardens, Thor realised how little he wanted him to be so, how in fact this was of course his entire problem. He kicked himself and followed.

 

Loki had not gone far- clearly, Thor thought, in expectation of his following. He supposed that this was encouraging at least, though the smug tight smile he saw tugging at the corners of Loki’s lips upon hearing him approach was less so. Loki leant upon the wall, arms folded, looking out down to the sea, following with his eyes, as he so often did, the wheeling of the birds across the sound. Thor watched his shoulders rise and fall in a soft sigh as though he had already imagined this conversation in his mind so clearly they did not even have to have it.

 

“I know what you’re going to say Thor,” he said, wearily but not unkindly – and in many ways it as this lack of passion that frightened Thor the most – “You’re going to shout and rage, rail against what has to be. You’ll beg me to protest, to make them change their mind and when I don’t you’re going to be angry and hate me.”

 

Finally Loki turned to him and for the first time Thor saw sadness, brimming like pools in the rain and washing the greyish eyes an almost sparkling green, leaves in the damp of an early morning.

 

“And do you think, perhaps –“ this time his lip quivered – “We could just not. Can we just skip the whole scene and go on to the part where I’m gone and you get over it –“

 

Finally Thor had to interrupt;

 

“Loki do you _want_ to be gone? I don’t understand –“

 

“What is it that you don’t understand, Thor?”  For the first time Loki’s voice became bitter – “Why I’m not weeping and bemoaning my fate? Why I’m not a selfish, emotionally incontinent wreck like you? Are you _sad_ that I’m _not?_ Is that it?”

 

“Did you _know_ about this?”

 

Loki’s eyes narrowed, then he lowered them and shook his head –

 

“Yes –“ he shook it again – “No. That is. It was never discussed, but yes I’ve suspected something like this was going to happen ever since they went away. I’m just glad it’s not worse.”

 

“Not worse?” Thor echoed, incredulous – “Why did you never say something?”

 

“You really are dense aren’t you? What did you think I meant by the “ _it can’t last”_ and the “ _I don’t trust it?”_ Did you take me for a fool and unfounded misery maker? _Jesus_ Thor – don’t you _know_ I’m always right?”

 

“Don’t you _care?”_

“What good would it do me if I did?” Loki kicked the wall in tired frustration, head swimming with the irony that it was such an effort _not_ to care it might almost be better if he just admitted that he did. 

 

Thor turned his head away, too much of his body following the gesture for Loki’s liking, he could see too much of Thor’s thoughts in the gesture, or his heart if not his thoughts. Could see that this was too heavy upon him even for him to be able to shout and argue as the had both been prepared for him to do.

 

“Where is it –“ he asked, leadenly – “Where do they have in mind?”

 

“We’ve been talking about Oxford,” Loki nodded, voice just as flat, although he was torn himself over this, between a certain guilty happiness at the idea and, as Thor predictably swallowed out loud –

 

“So far”.

 

He had not thought the weight of this could become heavier, but this added news was a kick to the chest he had not imagined could hit as hard as it did. And suddenly it hurt Loki that Thor would not meet his eyes and he felt a pull in two directions that was almost a physical strain – the one urging him to walk away, to not get into this and the other to fly into his big brothers’ arms. In the end he managed a strange combination, at any rate a point stiffly between the two;

 

“ _Thor –“_ he whispered in what sounded like a remonstrance, he did not know against what, leaning his head in and pressing himself to Thor’s chest while his arms still hung limply at his sides. It should not have been such a relief that Thor wrapped him instantly into his arms – but it was, Loki pressing his hands up crushed against his chest in a gesture that seemed uncertain whether it was a pressing towards or a pulling away. Thor simply squeezed his little brother tight, resting his chin upon Loki’s head, expressing in his embrace everything he was trying to say until it was as though he had really spoken out loud.

 

“I _know,”_ Loki sighed, uncertain whether he hated it this way or not – “I know you want to keep me. I know it’s all you’ve ever wanted. But you can’t. Not this day – I’m –“ but he stops just shy of the word sorry. Thor does not hear it.

 

“I will wait my whole life for that day, then.”

 

“I know that too,” Loki sighed again – “I wish – that you would not.”

 

Thor’s forehead creased in consternation –

 

“It is the same for you brother?” there was an uncertainty in the statement – he never meant it to be a question, never wanted it to be – he would never have thought could be there. Loki paused a moment before replying, not wanting to lie this time, neither wanting really to try and express the truth.

 

“All my life –“ he finally said, and slowly – “I’ve never wanted anybody else.”

 

It _was_ the truth. It was just not quite the relevant answer to Thor’s question. To his relief it seemed to satisfy all the same.

 

For a long time after that they stood there, unwilling to break apart, clinging on to childhood with tentative roots tearing away at the soil of their past. Overhead the birds wheeled and their predatory cry rang hollow out across the cloudy sky which looked down upon them and did not care.

 

__x__

 

 

**This kinda went more melancholy than I meant it to. Heigh ho, the next bit will be cheerier.**

**I apologise a hundredfold for the delay in this, I’ve been stuck in a farmhouse on the middle of a moor in Cornwall for two weeks with absolutely no internet access and family making me far too tired to write. So I am sorry if this chapter is a bit stiff and creaky around the corners, I’m just getting back in the swing of it! The next update will come much quicker! :-)**


	15. Chapter 15

 

 

Change comes as change must, inevitable and impossible to avoid, like trying to stop the turn of the seasons.  Loki had always known that this time in which they could be always together would have to one day come to an end. Had known it more painfully than he would ever let on, without ever truly accepting it or wanting it to be that way. He supposed he had let it tarnish the time they _had_ had, unable to leave something so perfectly golden alone. He supposed he had to always be that way, had to damage something perfect himself rather than see anyone else damage it and risk breaking his heart.

 

Or at any rate, he supposed he had to break his heart on his own terms. He supposed it was his nature as change was the nature of all things. He hated it and himself with it.

 

Thor too, when he forced himself to think about it, had always known their unquestioned togetherness could not go on forever. But he had gone the opposite way about it, pushing it so far to the back of his mind in his attempt to preserve the perfection of the present that when it had finally been challenged his only resort was to rain furious denial onto what had to be.

 

And because they simply could not do otherwise, the more Thor came – albeit unhappily - to accept the imminent separation the more Loki, albeit quietly, began to tremor internally at the thought of what had to be.

 

And yet all these stages took place in less than a week of real time, upon the realisation that came to them after all this concern – that Loki had in fact only three weeks left with them before he left for England they both somehow caught the wings of a new found optimism. For Loki it came upon the remembrance of a longer future, a realisation that university, after all, did not last forever, that should he want to – and he was uneasily uncertain that he even did – he could after that return to West Egg forever if he so desired. Then there were the Christmas and summer vacations that he would be spending either at home or with the family in France and more than all of this he realised that a huge part of him was actually relieved. After all the possible terrible things he had imagined could come at the end of these last two years – this really was not nearly as bad as it could have been. The more he thought about it, the more the idea – especially of studying – appealed to him.

 

These same arguments did not quite win with Thor, though he came to join Loki in his excitement purely because of the infectious quality of all of Loki’s emotions. He saw the foolishness in continuing in their mutual antagonism for the rest of the short time they had and with customary good humour and what Loki perceived as a really quite ridiculous ability to think only of the absolute present, he threw himself whole heartedly into enjoying the time they had left.

 

In what he considered an especially noble act of repentance for his initial reactions, Thor accompanied Loki one afternoon on a book buying mission in the city. It was hard not to smile at Loki’s enthusiasm as he allowed himself full reign of all the bookstores in town. Thor could not help but follow him around, smiling resignedly and carrying all his increasingly heavy bags of books. Later that evening he even allowed himself to get drawn into helping Loki with his packing, which essentially meant doing all of the hauling around – indeed doing everything- whilst Loki sat cross legged in the middle of the bed giving out orders like a perfect little prince.

 

Eventually Thor placed a final load of books in the third case full and stood up straight pushing the hair out of his eyes. He frowned down at the open case –

 

“You do realise you can’t _just_ take books away with you for the entire first term?”

 

“Why not?” Loki put on his most innocent, inquisitive face.

 

“Well you need – clothes. I don’t know – other….things –“ Thor faltered, not entirely certain _what_ Loki’s priorities were. Loki brushed this off with an airy sweep of his hand.

 

“I can get clothes in England.”

 

“Are you sure?”

 

“Yes Thor, I’m almost certain they have clothes in England.” Loki rolled his eyes.

 

“Well then you could buy books over there too!”

“Oh I _will.”_

“But we bought the whole world in books today!”

 

“Yes but that’s just to last me until I get there. Nearly two weeks on a boat, Thor – what do you expect me to do?”

 

“I would not expect anyone to get through _that_ many books in that space of time.”

 

“Yes but that’s because you’re a big illiterate –“

 

“I am _not_ illiterate!”

 

“- moron –“

 

“Shut up Loki –“

 

“Who can’t read three words strung together!”

 

Loki finished, laughing as Thor came at him with a pillow. They were both laughing and breathless several minutes later after a tumbling, flurrying pillow fight that resulted in an explosion of goose feathers bursting in a soft storm like warm snow around their heads.

 

“Now look what you did, you made feathers happen.”

 

“Well you made me carry tons of books around all day.”

 

“It was not _tons._ And anyway you didn’t mind. Because you love me.”

 

“Yes –“ Thor tuned to him, suddenly serious, taking Loki’s hand in his intently – “Yes Loki, always – you do know it – don’t you?”

 

“I suppose I must.” The corners of Loki’s lips pulled in that smile Thor loves almost more than any of his others. It was a look that cannot help but make him smile too, for the mischief dancing in Loki’s eyes. He ignored a brief, sharp twinge, nettles rubbing his chest to think how much he was going to miss that. He wondered – and doubted – if anyone could make him laugh like Loki could in all the time he was away.

 

Before he quite means to Loki has wriggled into Thor’s lap, before Thor can think Loki is kissing him. He had been afraid to do this since the news came for fear he would fall apart. He does not fall apart. He felt stupid to have thought he would when it is was easy as breathing to kiss him back, as natural. When Loki’s hand wriggled down into his lap he could only think for a second how little he would be able to manage without this before he could think of very little at all.

 

There was a tenderness between them they had felt awkward to demonstrate before and in a strange, sad way it was wonderful to be able to express this, for they had never before had cause and Loki came with tears streaking his cheeks for fear of this power of feeling and for the oddness of loving its expression. Afterwards Thor held him against his pounding chest more fiercely than he thrust into him, wanting to keep him closer than ever for knowing how far away he would soon have to be.

 

“You will still be mine – won’t you?” Thor whispered, not looking at Loki for fear of his silliness being laughed at. To his relief all Loki replied was –

 

“You’re an asshole. Of course I will. Will you?”

 

“You know I will.”

 

Loki curled in closer.

 

Later still, they lay sleepily, loosely together, talking nonsense for the first time in what seemed like far too long. Loki would have hated to admit how much he had missed it.

 

“They don’t have prohibition in England.” Thor had murmured.

 

“And yet somehow I’m more excited about them having really good tea.”

 

“You’re – more excited by _tea_ than champagne? Are you mad?”

 

“Probably. Anyway I just really like tea.”

 

Thor shook his head in the dark;

 

“I can just see you –“ he yawned largely, king of the beasts – “With your tea and your books, sat looking all studious, thinking your deep thoughts about I don’t know what –“

 

His words trailed off and, with that habit he had, that both annoyed and amused Loki in equal measures, fell instantly asleep. Loki smiled, ruefully, and twisted in the bed to kiss the golden head gently, a dark butterfly alighting on the shiniest thing it could find.

 

“Thinking of you,” he whispered, so quietly he could barely hear his own words.

 

__x__

 

 

**It’s taking me a little longer than I thought to actually get this idiot to university. There may be another chapter of goodbyes yet! ….though I strongly suspect it will contain porn if that helps!**

 

**And yes – Loki packing is me packing – all books and get someone else to do it! :-P**


	16. Chapter 16

 

Almost harder even than saying goodbye was having to do it without a tenth of the emotion they both felt. Thor was convinced it was easier for Loki to hide his feelings, because he always made it look so much like it was. Conversely Loki was convinced it was easier for Thor because in expressing himself externally somewhat more incontinently than he did Loki supposed it must be easier to bear the weight of feeling on the inside.

 

Hard too to hide from their parents, the buzzing afterglow of the night before. It burned so strongly they were both sure it was visible, like an aura surrounding them both in a haze of shimmering silver and gold.

 

How Loki had turned around from sealing up the last of his cases with a look that turned within seconds from tiredness into a frantic wide eyed fear that in his tiredness he somehow allowed Thor to see, just this once. Thor’s eyes, these past few days, had barely left Loki’s face, watching him always, afraid to let a moment slip away, a core of him so afraid he would lose him entirely, irrationally, ridiculously nervous that this parting was forever. The last thing he wanted was to dare express the sentiment he was sure Loki would laugh at that it felt like forever.

 

But then Loki’s face – his lips slightly parted as if in sudden shock, finding himself winded with the force of his worry, and those wide, suddenly staring, sparkling eyes that ripped away fifteen years in a moment and he was that boy again who had hidden in Thor’s bed, afraid at the rumours of war. Before he could cover it Thor had held out his arms, and before he could pull it back Loki had thrown himself into them, expansively crushing himself against his one rock, his certainty.

 

How quickly they had both swung the desperate cleaving embrace into kissing and clawing at one another to get closer, the unspoken mutuality _if I could get inside you and curl up there forever I would._ How Thor’s hand had ghosted Loki’s hip in the spot and in the way that made his breath hitch for lust, how the very teasing tenderness sent bolts of lightning into the pit of him, instantly sparking and tingling with want. How he whispered, needy and pressing ever inwards as Thor pressed kisses dizzyingly into his neck –

 

“ _Never let me go Thor, please never let me go.”_

 

And Thor knew he did not mean it – or that yes, he meant it now but he would not the very next day and he held him tight and whispered reassurance over and over that he never would, never, and it was true as much as it was not. Indeed it was more true than not, for there would be no letting go for him, even with the distance between them, and they both knew it well. Even Loki, beneath his spoken fear, knew that he feared more for his own nature than for Thor’s. Feared that his heart was not to be trusted and did not want that to be the way it was.

 

How unimportant it was and yet how vital how quickly their clothing fell away, as though they disintegrated at each desperate tearing clutch. Crushing together, skin on skin – it was too much a necessity to be as important as the sound of one another’s voice, the feel of their life’s breath against the neck, whispering into their ears, every word a promise an unbreakable vow, every cliché Thor had been holding back spilling out of him as he bowed Loki down upon the bed like branches dipping in this curious dancing wind that blew upon them now.

 

_How will I do without you, cannot bear the thought of not being able to touch you, want you need you, miss you already, never let anyone else touch you, mine Loki mine –_

 

Incantations poured into the pale skin, pressed in there and sealed with the kisses he poured across every inch –

 

_Want to kiss every bit of you, remember you in my dreams and when I’m awake, want to feel you still beneath me –_

Loki’s silence opening him up like a vessel into which it could all be poured, his body opening like his eyes, liquid and silver, taking Thor’s lust as he took in his promises. They were all the same, Thor sinking inside of him as he filled him with feelings Loki knew he could never express quite so freely. Still it was more than he could often do to take it and Thor was grateful, knowing how little Loki allowed real tenderness and that his acceptance of Thor’s sweetest most intense desire was his best response to the outpour of words  upon whose sentiment alone the silver tongue could falter.

 

For this time he did not scramble and claw, despite his need, instead exquisitely allowing Thor to take his time, knowing that he was trying to remember everything in detail that could last the length of his absence. Somehow it made him blush in a way the most brutal of fucking could not. How Thor watched his hands clutching at the air with slender fingers, the wrists held in Thor’s hands, how the large fingers stroked those little wrists with the bird like bones that fit into his hands like a child’s. How every sigh he made, every flutter of his eyelids, was under that loving scrutiny and how Thor shivered at the feel of Loki’s breath as though he tried to hold that too in remembrance, kissed him as he thrust into him with lips that shook for love.

 

How Loki knew that silent acceptance only was the closest to expression of sentiment he could ever come at all and how he wished – and oh how more than anything it was the one thing he would never ever speak – he could be more like Thor. How, at least in this, they were harmonic, like every nuance of a tune finally coming together in one entity and he did not have to be Loki, did not have be Thor but they could both become one perfect entity that was both of these and neither all at the same time.

 

And how, at the end of this perfection was reached as Thor spilled inside him, face contorted in a roar of pleasure so intense it was silent, and Loki met that silence with a cry like the gulls outside, gods of Long island all of them, circling, circling, watching it all and flying. 

 

They clung close the whole of that night; though they knew it would only make separation more painful, there seemed to be nothing else they could do. All night they alternated between frantic kisses and love making, holding tight and sleeping, crushing up close like children with nothing but each other in the world.

 

At some point, words;

 

“You won’t – there won’t be anyone else while you’re gone?”

 

“Thor you offend me, you always offend me.”

 

“I just could not bear –“

 

“And do you think, brother, that I could?”

 

Thor smiled, for Loki would only ever make such a confession by disguising it as a question.

 

“I don’t know how I will live, wanting you without you there.”

 

“You will live. We will because we must. Change must as it must Thor, it was a stolen season in which we held it suspended so long.”

 

“Do not say you did not enjoy our season while we had it –“

 

“No – I will not say that.”

 

“Do you think – one day – we might –“

 

“Be together forever?” Loki’s smile wicked in the moonlight but his voice as serious as it was teasing, half one half the other.

 

“Maybe – do you think –“

 

“You’re a silly romantic fool.”

 

“But do you?”

 

“Maybe.”

 

“I love you Loki.”

 

“I love you Thor.”

 

They were children yet, truly, with nothing but each other in the world.

 

__x__

 

**This has taken me too long – I’m so sorry – but I’ve actually written a little of the next chapter too so it won’t be half as long in coming! :-)**


	17. Chapter 17

 

 

 

**Dear Thor, Dearest Loki**

**Being a selection of letters, the one to the other, during Loki’s first term abroad.**

_Dear Thor,_

_How strange it feels to be writing to you! I confess I never felt our being apart as strangely as I do now, sitting down to pen this. I never imagined a time when I would not just be able to speak and tell you everything I felt I wanted to. I admit that was not always as much as might have and curiously I feel as though I might say more to you by writing it down than ever I managed vocally. I’m not sure I like that much, still we’ll see how that goes._

 

_You’ll want me to say how I miss you first I am sure so let’s get that over and done with and say it. There I said it, thank goodness._

_I must say I felt so bold upon setting sail alone. You’ll argue of course that I was not alone, that these ships are full of people but not to me I’m afraid. In truth I find the enforced mingling with any kind of society to be fairly intolerable I’m afraid._

 

_This at least makes it a pleasure to write to you, an excuse to hide myself away in this rather delightful cabin. It’s that, or walk out on deck staring out to see like some tragic poet. Though I must admit a penchant for such sunset rambles especially. You know when the sea is on fire and it looks like the end of the world, blood in the water and something in the waves in that light that sings to my heart and I – oh this went more predictable than I wished it to go – I wish that you were here at this end of the world each night with me._

 

_Eh. I know you can’t write back for a while. But if I don’t have a heap of your letters waiting for me in Oxford I’ll be very disappointed in you, brother mine. I would even suspect you of having a life._

_Love love,_

 

-x-

 

 

_Dear Thor,_

_Scribbling today – do you ever wonder who you are? I do. When I wrote to you two days ago I thought that was me, thoughtful, studied, intellectual and alright, not as modest as I ought to be about such things. Today ….._

_Today I tore my room on the ship apart. Thor, so much wine happened …..so, so much. Then things broke, smash, glass everywhere, crystal shining in the swinging lights.  I didn’t mean to. I don’t know where this comes from, so angry, so so angry. Sometimes I think that I’ve been angry my whole life. Don’t know where it comes from. Is it me? Is this me Thor, or was the other Loki me? The one who wrote to you last? Can I be so many me? Can I hold all of this in one of me and keep myself?_

_Thor I’m so scared. I’m scared I’m gonna fall apart and now, so far, you won’t be able to scoop all my little pieces back together, mend them and hold me close until the glue of your love sets. I’m scared I’m a pathetic waste of space. I’m scared I’ll lose everything – you, myself – because I’m not good Thor, there’s something wrong with me and I don’t know what it is, like I’m one of these broken glass fragments, a little shard of sharpness. Hurts my fingers this glass, this sharp part of me hurts my head, Thor I’m not making any sense, I don’t like it, I love you. Do I like that? Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know anything._

 

_I can’t believe I’m writing all this shit. All the times I’ve tried to hide this corner of my heart from you. All the times I – argh! Hopefully I won’t send it. Hopefully it will be illegible if I do. Hopefully, hopefully – god!_

_Thor I love you, I love you so much, it tears at this stupid heart like fangs and claws – whatever I say, whatever I do, all the other stupid things I tell you, never doubt this Thor, never doubt –_

_-x-_

_Dearest Loki,_

_My precious, dearest Loki – oh I could call you so many things it would start to sound like sarcasm and it would all be true. My life, my brother, my love, my Loki. I wrote you so many letters in just these first two weeks, I couldn’t possibly have sent you them all, you’d have been laughing at me so hard the whole way through your first classes that you wouldn’t have been able to concentrate._

_Of all the things to reply to, I have to reply to the questions I guess you did not mean to ask – yes Loki I did read your last letter, though it was difficult, you’d crumpled it up so many times – I’ll wager it saw the bottom of a bin more than once!_

_Loki, my Loki, do not you doubt that I_ want _to see every corner of your heart, even the ones you hide. Do you think I do not know there is darkness in there, brother? Do you not know that I love you at least in part because and not in spite of it?_

_You say you do not know yourself. Loki, do you think I am so certain of everything I know_ myself _so completely? Do you think any of us do? But Loki believe me when I say that I know you, you are all the Lokis that you see! I never for a moment imagined your two letters to be written by different people. It is all you Loki, all the person I know and love. If you can trust me, at least believe that I think what I say, just write me “Shut up Thor you idiot oaf”. You see I know you well enough my Loki._

_You will think I’m mad how often I’ve said your name so far. I confess I give myself every cause to say it aloud where I can for it tingles so on the tip of my tongue. I want to say it over again and again for it is every prayer I could ever speak, Loki my Loki. God I miss you! I wondered how much I could write without saying it and really I did better than I thought._

_With all my heart Loki, brother, beloved,_

_Your Thor._

_-x-_

_Dear Thor,_

_Shut up you idiot oaf._

_With smiles,_

_Your Loki._

_-x-_

_Dearest Loki,_

_Was that letter even worth its weight in postage? You would think me a greater fool than I know you do if I told you how often I had read it, taking all could from every word. I am glad you understand, at least today, I know you may not tomorrow but for now that must be enough._

_With smiles! It was good to hear brother, for now I see your sweetest smile kissing at my heart, I can see your grin so close I could reach up and touch the upturned edges of your lips. Wanting you is terrible without you here and I could cry for reaching out to touch you. You are always in my dreams, Loki you are my dreams. I lie awake at night watching the window for your green light. I stand by the shore looking out across the sea for your boat, so ridiculously sure I will see it any moment from across the bay._

_And yes I admit I think of you and fuck myself thinking of every part of you. I sleep with items of yours in bed with me, holding them close to take out every last scent of you – and – I shamefully admit I fucked one of your shirts .Oh my dearest brother – when you are home for Christmas -!_

_Well- and moving swiftly on from this, everything is dull as powder without you here. Learning the business, working with father- it is not even worth repeating. Although there is a surprising element that I will speak to you about when you are back, it would be unwise to do so here._

_Tell me about your life in England that I might have something of more interest to think about – nay indeed that I might pretend I did not write that paragraph about your shirt._

_All of my heart, always Loki,_

__x__

_Dear Thor,_

_So you could write what is positively pornography to your baby brother but you cannot repeat details of father’s business? You can colour me intrigued – although I’ve had suspicions for a while._

_England is a wonderful country, so much more tasteful than home, and I confess I have not a bad word to say about my studies. Student accommodation – or at least the accommodation I am designated-is rather delightful actually and I have not even begun about the tea. I never cease to adore the_ age _here and the history. I was made for places like this and if it were not that you were there would never wish to return home._

_But I do wish for you brother – I – well never mind._

_There is a beautiful juxtaposition in studying the newest theories of scientific endeavour (I would not even begin to try and explain it to you for you would not understand) surrounded by all this history. The very walls and corridors of this place ring with it. The libraries and quiet echoes of this place are my greatest joy and I have found the sweetest comfort in my own company. I admit I find my fellow students strange and yet still uninteresting. Well I have not your people skills, nor desire to know them better._

_Well – and I have been wanting to say this since term began, you can decide for yourself if it is entirely true – I must go for I have class!_

_Your Loki._

_P.s . I do hope it was not one of my good shirts and that you clean it_ extremely _thoroughly._

_P.p.s. You’re disgusting._

__x__

_Dearest Loki,_

_I never realised before how little there is for me here without you. The days pass so slowly without you here to make me smile and despair in equal measures. I console myself with picturing you at your studies – and such a pretty picture you do make. I fear if I were with you as I would wish you would not remain as tranquil as you are in my mind for long. I could not come up behind you bent over your books without wanting to kiss you. My Loki._

_But you should not lock yourself away always in some library, you know! You should meet people, get out in the world. It must be such a new world to explore, such pleasanter society to your eyes._

_For me now, I only count the days until you return to us at Christmas, until then consider me –_

_Always your own,_

_x_

 

_Dear Thor,_

_I gave a lot of thought to what you said about “getting out more”. Yes, thank you so much for that. But on the whole I’m not sure it’s for me. To be honest I’m finding the avoidance of society in all its glittering array of hypocrisy and awfulness to be open of the huge upsides of being away from home._

_Here in this curious microcosm of university, we have a whole new kind of society in the even more rigidly bizarre and enforced structure of student “Societies” themselves. I’m afraid there’s not a one that suits me. I did give some thought to the so – called “Riot Club” – well it’s not really called that except by everyone. But honestly, it’s creepy, elitist, brutal and anarchic – all of which sounds wonderful were it not for the fact that the members are all complete and utter wankers. Underline that. Gross._

_To be honest I don’t like anyone much. The only people I find myself getting on with are the only two girls on my course. Although before you get over excited and sweaty palmed with panic – it is_ not _like that in the slightest. At most be glad that they’re at least getting me out now and again. And that’s what you’ll have to make do with for now._

_In other news I missyoueverydayacheforyoueverynight– but do forget I said that and destroy this when you’ve read it,_

_All my something,_

_-x-_

_Dearest Loki,_

_I could not possibly destroy a single word you write me brother, even that terribly long one that I am sure I could not quite make out and so I am sure you have no need of any embarrassment._

 

_The days feel ever longer, I cannot help but think it is without you here, but I know it is at least in part the season. Snows are coming in off the sound and on a clear day you can hear the bridge shake beneath the weight of the traffic._

_I cannot write long today for we head into the city in minutes and I must send this to you today if it is to reach you on time now,_

_In eager expectation,_

_-x-_

_Dear Thor,_

_I rather think I’ll make a surreptitious descent upon home in the gathering dark of some evening not too long in the future._

_Watch for my light,_

___x___

**There’s a book of letters between the Fitzgeralds called _Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda_ upon which I may have modelled this chapter! Normal service will resume next instalment!**

**Having said that – I totally think I could write a whole lot more of these….so I may put them in as a bonus chapter at the very end!**


	18. Chapter 18

**Trigger warnings: Contains explicit scenes of playing at rape that is not real rape in the slightest, nor even dub con, but a warning for anyone who might not like that. Also bdsm with belts, I appreciate a lot of people don’t like that. As always feel free to skip :-)**

**18.**

 

The warm whirlwind of the festive season was over and gone far too soon for anybody’s liking. Thor wondered at time that could clatter by so fast and yet drag its feet so slowly. It was Loki; it was always Loki who set the pace of everything. There was so much to do, so much to express, so much bottled love to pour into one another that their time was over before they felt they had done a tenth of what they would have liked. They felt they had been thrown hard against one another in a frenzied, impassioned storm of tenderness, too nervous of impending separation to do anything too rough or strange and at the same time too deeply, too darkly in love for any kind of restraint.

 

All too soon they were at the harbour again, sending Loki off back to England, Loki wishing they would not, or at any rate wishing it was only Thor.

 

Thor crushed him into a last hug, keeping it as brotherly as he could, though he had long since forgotten what that was supposed to be like.

 

“I don’t know if I can keep doing this,” he said quietly.

 

“I had thought it might get easier,” Loki replied, in something quite close to agreement.

 

“I don’t want it to get easier – I –“ Thor pulled back, just in time, knowing their parents were watching with those worried smiles that seemed to be fixed to them of late. He could not say, must not say – how it is _right_ that it should hurt when half of him is gone. Loki helps, for once, breaking out of the hug and affecting a sigh –

 

“You’re a bloody fool.”

 

“I am a _what?”_ Thor scowled in amusement, just to make Loki say it again.

 

“A bloody fool,” Loki reiterated, unashamed.

 

“My god, you’re starting to sound _British!”_

 

“Oh shut up.”

 

Thankfully though, this amused Thor enough to see Loki onto the boat without any further threats of emotional outbreak. They watched as the boat moved out, Thor following Loki on the deck with his eyes until he could not see him anymore, at which point he could see the glow of a green light receding, dragging out the point where he lost track of where Loki was until the boat itself was almost lost on the horizon. His parents frowned where he was watching;

 

“What is that?” his mother squinted. But Thor smiled and said nothing. It was meant for him and him alone, and in it he was sure were wrapped up all the things that Loki felt, the things that were the other half of his own feelings. And he would not share that with anyone.

 

-x-

 

They decided that the length of the Easter break made it impractical for Loki to come home for so short a time and so he agreed to wait it out in England and wait until they all met up in France for the summer.

 

As usual Thor could not help but feel that he was the only one who really suffered from this and it seemed to him as though even Loki did not care for if he did or not he would not say one way or another. When Thor decided he had the perfect answer and instead broke the news that he would join him in England for the break instead he was hurt to find Loki react with what seemed like complete indifference.

 

He came out of the sadness angrier perhaps than he had ever been, but made the journey to England all the same.

 

Perhaps it was his bad mood and how prepared he was only to continue angry that made him feel out of place as soon as he set foot on campus. It was evening when he arrived, tired and somewhat lost and when he saw Loki, very suddenly, in what he realised was the spot they had agreed to meet, he did not think to stop himself flaring into fury when he saw the girl that Loki was with.

 

She was a pale, blonde girl, exceptionally pretty, with cleverness and wit dancing in her eyes, and she kissed Loki on the cheek before she skipped blithely away, with a familiarity that made Thor’s blood boil.

 

He had just started to turn away, just started to storm off down the street, when a voice called him back –

“Thor!”

He turned to see Loki, walking towards him down the quiet street – “where are you going?”

“Home,” Thor snapped – “Where I’m needed.”

“You came all this way _not_ to see me?”

“I think I saw enough. I saw you – with that girl –”

“Look, I don’t know what you think you saw but –”

Thor strode towards him, furiously, meeting him in just a few steps –

“You going to lie to me Loki? You really think I’ll fall for that? Jesus –” he pushed him roughly by the shoulder and into the alleyway wall and the rough touch inflamed them both – “Do you _know_ how much I missed you? How much I wanted you? How I’ve ached every day you were gone touching myself and crying your name –”

“If it was something you wanted I’m surprised you didn’t come charging over here sooner, that is your way, isn’t it brother?”

Thor pushed Loki savagely into the wall. He had not realised until precisely now how much anger, how much frustration and need he had been trying to keep down, however much doing so was not in his nature. Had not realised how much he had missed the freedom to act as roughly as they had in their two years alone. He fell like thunder onto Loki’s lips, kissing him furiously and painfully –

“It’s only you Loki” he snapped – “It’s only ever been only you.”

“Did I ever give you cause to think differently?” Loki snarled back, just as angry – “However mean you were, however rough, whether I came to you willingly or not – didn’t I always give you just what you wanted –”

“Yes –” Thor growled, holding Loki painfully by the arms and shoving him round so his face went into the wall – “Yes you always were a good little hole for my cock Loki, I wish to god sometimes that is all you were – “

“You’re a brute –” Loki groaned, arousing himself with his own words – “A vicious insatiable brute and I hate you –”

“Oh hate me all you want –just spread your fucking legs while you do it –” Thor snapped, grinding his brutal erection into Loki’s backside and Loki instinctively spreading his legs just a little, arching back into the cock that owned him. Thor laughed mockingly and squeezed Loki’s wriggling ass in one large rough hand.

“You want my dick, Loki? You want your brother’s big dick? Come on, say it you little cock slut –”

“Brother please –” Loki sobbed, crying for the brutal press of the wall against his face, for Thor twisting his arm behind him so painfully he could have screamed if It were not for the shove of that monstrous twitching cock against his backside.

“Yes good,” Thor grunted, liking the words – “is that brother please fuck me? Fuck me like the whore I am? Aww –” he sneered– “or is it brother please stop hurting me? You like it when I hurt you Loki, you know you do. You really want me to stop our word’s still there, remember?”

Loki nodded vigorously, hissing at Thor to shut up which Thor took as the signal to continue that it was and that he needed and he twisted Loki’s arm viciously, Loki screeching in pain, tears spilling down his face.

“Yes, scream –” Thor snarled, tugging at his belt, “Scream little brother, bring them running, what do you think they’d say when they see you grovelling beneath me all ready for my cock? You want it like this you little shit, you always did – you know I’ll force you if I have to –“

Loki wept, as much for knowing how much Thor liked it at these times now than anything else as his big brother brutally yanked his pants down and grasped his throbbing cock –

“So what’s this, huh Loki?” he sneered spitefully in his ear – “What’s this in my hand if you don’t want your big brother to fuck the shit out of you –“ Loki let out a sob he no longer even faintly believed in – “Yes, you cry little brother,” Thor moaned, close to ecstasy – “you cry, you filthy slut - you know it just makes my dick harder, oh yes, and the more you mean it the harder I’ll fuck you baby brother, you know that don’t you? You’re gonna be so fucked Loki, you’ll feel it for days by the time I’m through with you – god Loki it’s been too long –“ Thor digs his nails into the soft flesh of Loki’s arse as he takes his cock out and pushes  it against him –

“See how hard you make me little brother? Fuck –” Thor broke off – and he was right that it had been too long because the mere feel of Loki’s skin against his tortured cock was too much and he could not control himself from spilling out suddenly and shuddering all across Loki’s skin and splashing to the floor. In his anger at himself Thor hissed in Loki’s ear –

“See what you made me do?” – whirled him round  and hurled him to the floor – “Now lick it up.”

“I will not,” Loki spat.

“You’ll lick it, filth, you’ll lap up my come with that sweet little tongue until that floor is shiny – or do I have to force you?”

“Yes,” Loki grinned from ear to ear – “Yes you have to force me. Give me your best, brother – you know you want to.”

Thor looked down at him, his own little brother on his hands and knees, about to lap up his come, with his ass exposed and his cock out. His own cock leapt again in response; yes, he wanted to hurt him and wanted it badly. He dragged his belt off and looped it in his hand, stroking Loki’s unmarked perfect ass with it before he cracked the belt down heavily. Loki screamed though his cock jerked, and he screamed and screamed as Thor thrashed into him again and again, kneeling over him to thrash him harder –

“Yes, you love this you piece of shit, you always did, take it, take it you little slut,” Loki sobbed in an ecstasy of pain and delight, managing to heave out a litany of –

“Stop, please stop,” between wailing, that he barely even meant.

“You want me to stop you better start licking. I’m not gonna stop Loki ‘til you’ve swallowed every drop,” he hissed with pleasure to see Loki, despite his grimacing, dip his head and start licking fast.

“Fuck yes, “ Thor snarled– “You lick that all up, there’s more where that came from. Fuck yes little brother – been feeding you my come since you were old enough to take it, my good hot little come–slut – you been good for me brother? You like the taste of my come?”

“Thor please –” Loki begged, “please god yes give me your cock brother, feed me all your come, rape me you monster please - rape me -”

“You want to be raped Loki?”  Thor dropped the belt and pushed his newly hard and throbbing cock against Loki’s hole, half snarling half laughing to find him already slick and ready for him – “ oh yes little brother you want it badly, you always did, always so ready for me  –”

“Did you give me any choice?”

Thor smirked –

“No,” - and taking his swollen heavy cock in his hand used it as a weapon with which to slap Loki’s already smarting skin, rubbing it into his face to humiliate him and smear streaks of come across his reddening cheeks – “filthy slut like you doesn’t deserve a choice little brother – oh yes –” he groaned when Loki whimpered in want – “I’ll beat you with my dick and I’ll fuck your hungry cunt any time I want – _any time I want brother –”_  he snarled, grabbed Loki’s hips and rammed his monstrous bludgeoning cock into Loki’s tight, slick little hole. Loki screamed and Thor roared with pleasure to hear it and feel that clenching suffering tightness –

“Oh fuck-” he roared – “Yes scream, you scream little brother that’s it, scream and cry, fuck, make my dick so hard, so hard baby brother such a good fuck, good cunt, god that feels so good you make my cock so hard Loki, so big and hard for you, take it brother take it –”

Loki could not help but wonder what else Thor could really expect him to do, taking every inch of his brother’s thick cock being all he could do at this time and no amount of fighting it would spare him, he knew, he had pretended to fight it hard enough times for Thor’s pleasure and for his own but he could not help but moan aloud with pleasure at the feel of that massive cock filling him again after so long. Thor heard and delighted in it –

“Oh yes Loki, you whore, you moan for me, moan for my cock you hungry little slut that’s it, good Loki _good_ little brother take it Loki, take it –”

“Thor please –” Loki whimpered, clawing at the cobblestones as Thor’s cock slammed into him – please you’re hurting me -

He cried because it was true and smiled because he knew how Thor would take this. Thor paused in his ramming to lean in hissing mockingly –

“Aww _poor_ Loki, poor abused little Loki – do you think I care? You’re mine to hurt – mine –” he thrust into him savagely, punctuating the verbal abuse of his little brother with brutal stabs of his cock into his body – “Mine to fuck. Mine to use. _Mine –_ to do what I want with whenever I want – god –” he groaned, the pleasure too intense to keep forming words, pounding into Loki more brutally than ever, knowing how much he was hurting him and loving it, Loki wailing in pain and delight, Thor’s cock torturing him in agony and ecstasy all together, filling him so completely he wondered he did not break.

And then he _did_ break; shattered into more pieces than he could count. All the darkest pieces of himself flying to all corners to be lost, at least for the time, and Thor with him, roaring into the dark, cries to echo around the walls in a release that had so much to give it felt for those delicious moments that it would never end.

The first coherent thing either of them said was –

“Shit,” from Loki, as he heard voices and saw lights approaching that suggested campus security were on their way. He poked Thor sharply – “Come on, we better run”.

Thor fought the shaking in his legs to stand and Loki took his hand in that enthusiastic clasp he had been so afraid of losing, his teeth flashed in the dark as he grinned at him infectiously ad they ran off into the night, all but giggling in their wake.

-x-

**So this chapter started to go a bit out of control length – wise. So there was a lot else I wanted to put in here, like actual talking and after/ continuation of sex stuff. But it’ll just have to wait til the next chapter! :-)**


	19. Chapter 19

Thor had thought often about falling in love. The dazzle and shimmer of the age demanded it; it was there in the music, in the dancing, in the shiver of light and the fizz of champagne. Everything sold love, screaming it to all who heard; feel me, taste me, know me. He had wondered, as the world demanded that he wonder, when this thing would happen, this event that seemed so singular and yet was guaranteed to change your world forever. He realised now it was a guarantee as plastic and trivial as that on the back of a kitchen appliance. He wondered why he had ever wondered.

In the breathless tumble into the dark of Loki’s campus room he watched him light the candles, eyes gradually accustoming themselves to the glow of the flickering light that more and more illuminated the room, illuminated Loki, upon whom his eyes were more fixed than on the room, outlining him in a halo of gold, elevating him in the reality before him almost to the brightness with which he shone in Thor’s mind. The crackling light cast shadows to sweep back across the pale cheek bones, shadows he wished he could chase down with his fingers, to lose his hands in the soft dark of Loki’s hair. He could never have fallen in love, not once; he fell every time he looked that way, every time he so much as thought upon the brother he had had no choice but to love even without the falling.

He realised that he had to be staring, probably in a somewhat slack-jawed manner, as he was certain Loki was seconds away from pointing out. So he closed his mouth and covered up for it fast;

“Do they not have electricity in England?”

“You’re an oaf,” Loki rolled his eyes – “And a slow one – and I will teach you something of what it is to be half way romantic if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

He turned around in the dancing half dark, a smile that could be made out of the candle flame playing capriciously around his lips and Thor could not help but wonder at this strange and beautiful creature, so intriguing to him he could barely believe they were related let alone comprehend that he could know him better than anyone. He swallowed as Loki ran feather-light fingertips across his jaw, a glint in those silvery greenish eyes, more wicked than a smile as he slid up against him, sinuous as a shadow –

“You take with so little thought to subtlety –” he whispered, fingers on his arm, stroking gently, tingling and more tortuous than had they been around his cock which ached already at the closeness of those lips he knows Loki would not let him kiss until he is half dead from it – “Sometimes I wonder if you love me at all.”

There was not a hint a of genuine wonder in Loki’s voice, and Thor knew that he was playing him and could do nothing but offer himself up as a hand to be played.

“Loki I –”

“Shhh –” Loki smiled minutely, finger to Thor’s lips – “You’re mine brother, if I ever I am yours and you _will_ love me –”

He watched that sweet shadow turning in the dark, watched the curve of Loki’s back as he walked away from him, trailing his hand out behind him to take Thor’s, to lead him to his bed, a single in the corner of the small student room made magical by Loki’s strange lights and still more flickering smile. Thor watched him with eyes that had never seen anything else and wondered how he could demand - as though it could be a request – that he do what he could never help but do, any more than he could chose to breathe. But it was not until Loki, still leading him by the hand, dropped himself down onto the bed, on his back, pulling Thor over him like a blanket, that he could see the wide, needful uncertainty in those bewitching eyes. In them he saw everything; so much that was vital to his own existence that he missed the basic doubt, the fear that struck his heart with the knowledge that Loki _could_ doubt his love – and the need, intense and screaming, for him to give him that love.

“Give me everything,” he said, in a fierce whisper – “Everything you are, every time you ever fell in love with me. Give me it all, now, to me, just to me –” he hovered on the verge of saying please, Thor could see it, naked in his eyes, but pride, even now, kept it from his lips. He wanted to speak, to answer, to reassure –

_Yes Loki, yes, take my love, take the heart that breaks and beats for you, take it and drain it and never give it back, or give it back to me in whatever state you leave it I will take, I am yours and always have been yours. I will give you everything I am and more, forgive me brother, I have loved you more than I can stand and always will. Take my love and never give it back._

But he did not. He did not have to breath to speak it and still to give and so instead did nothing but give, and Loki, so often held back from him, even at the most intimate moments, fell open for him like a book he could never stop reading, grasping and sighing, in the dark, whispering a constant incantation;

_Tell me you love me, tell me you’re mine, tell me you’ll never love anyone else, love love love oh please tell me –_

\- such a prayer Thor thought he would never hear spill so freely and desperately from those beautiful lips, himself drowning in the ripple of shadow and golden light across the pale skin, sun on the snow, afraid his own hands would mar that perfection, hands that were desperate but as tender and more than Loki could demand.

The moment caught him, spellbound, but the magic broke after they did and he rolled over and could not find room to fit side by side in the tiny bed. In the end, after much harrumphing, they finally found a position in which Loki lay almost on top of him, pressed into him like a cat, as though, as Loki pointed out, Thor was just another mattress on the bed.

“And one I wish I always had,” Loki added.

“You do?” Thor could not help it – “I – I feared you did not even want to see me. That I would be as unwelcome here as I am out of place.”

Loki murmured those last nine words to himself thoughtfully –

“I have felt that all my life,” he added, leaving a pause for Thor to understand and when he did he did not know what else to do but hold him closer. “She was just a friend, Thor,” he added, apropos of what was several conversations back, if there had been conversation at all – “Leah. She doesn’t swing that way and she knows that I don’t either. That’s all it is.”

“She – wait –” Thor struggled through the implications of this – “You don’t?”

“What?”

“You don’t like girls at all?”

Loki shrugged –

“I never really thought about it. No, I guess not, not like that – besides – I promised, I told you - nobody else, not ever.”

“Well you do not always keep your promises.”

“No, I must admit I don’t. Look, it just seemed redundant to think about any of that when I’m fucking my brother as it is, okay?”

“To think about – girls?”

“Why – do you?”

It was Thor’s turn to shrug;

“Theoretically, I suppose, but –”

“Oooh, it knows long words –”

“Shut up Loki. But – as I was saying – it’s just you, always and forever, you are my brother and my heart and anything else is unimportant.”

“Good.” Loki nodded, yawned and stretched – “I do so want to be important.”

Thor kissed the top of Loki’s head;

“Always Loki, always.”

Even though the place was strange and the future an uncertainty they dared not speak about, they slept that night carried on the peaceful current of a life they could not imagine as anything other than shared. Even Loki knew then that whatever was coming, however much that river might part in the future, it would always find itself coming to rest in the same sea. He heard their boats beating against the storms that were to come and cast all the magic he could in his mind around them to keep them at least on the edge of safe. That night he heard in his mind like a promise the cry of the gulls across the sound and saw them gliding across his future as if it were the sky.

Thor saw what he always saw, the green light of Loki’s boat coming home across the bay.

-x-

**Gonna get this story moving towards a close now, I feel it’s gone a bit sleepy. Picking the pace up next chapter with plot and happenings!**

**Also I’m sorry for the delays in everything….I wish I had a good excuse but no, I’m just a bit badly addicted to flightrising.com at the moment and it’s killed me for all useful purposes. :-(**

**I _am_ gonna make myself write still though, I promise!**


	20. Chapter 20

**20.**

 

The years of Loki’s absence dragged at Thor like a dangerous undertow in the water. But it was worse even than that; it bit at him like tiny crawling bugs to fear as continually as he did, that it did not drag the same way for Loki. He felt wicked for this being a worry and not a relief but he felt it as such nonetheless for that. A sense of unease had filtered into him like pollution in the air – an idea that there were things like pulling winds threatening to sweep the green light out of his life forever.

And then, like that capricious wind, Loki was back. After weeks of suspicious silence in their communications Thor had lain awake and restless one night to see – blinking as though he were in a dream – a familiar green glow illuminating the glass. Surprise did not stop him from leaping to his feet the instant a gentle but demanding rap sounded on the pane. He threw open the window in his excitement to a yelp, quickly muffled and Loki’s angry face shouting, laughing, whispering all at once –

“Be careful you idiot, are you trying to kill me?”

He grasped Thor’s hand, not ceasing in his tirade as he hauled himself in;

“How would you ever explain to mother why I was lying dead in a crumpled heap on the grass outside your window when I’m not even meant to be back in the country yet?”

Thor could not wipe the broad smile from his face –

“And I am happy to see you too Loki.” Loki smiled then, and allowed himself to be crushed into Thor’s arms without any further complaint.

“Say that again,” he murmured, head on Thor’s chest, home.

“That I am happy to see you?”

“No, the part where you said my name – for I have heard it so clearly all of these nights gone that the dream is more in having it now in my ears.”

Thor’s eyes flashed down at his little brother in delighted surprise;

“Why Loki, was that _sentiment?_ ”

“Oh shut up, Thor.”

And the smiling lips shut him up well enough indeed for the rest of that night, but for one exception –

“You came home early?”

“Yes.”

“Loki – you did – graduate – didn’t you?”

“With flying colours you absolute prat, as if I would not.”

-x-

The initial joy upon Loki’s return was unabashed and elated from both his mother and from Thor and as he could not have helped but suspect it would be – somewhat restrained from their father. After that, it alarmed Thor to observe Loki drifting somewhat listlessly around the place, as though he could not quite find any one spot to ever settle in.

“I don’t know that I belong here anymore,” he said.

“That’s ridiculous, where else would you belong?”

Loki kicked a pillar in a return to teenage petulance;

“I don’t _know,_ Thor, don’t you think I’d be there if I did?”

“Loki I love you, can you not just be happy?” Loki looked at him sharply, eyes icy in the early winter’s frost, face pale and pinched.

“That’s typical,” he snapped, bitterly – “That you would take it all personally.”

“Well is it not personal?” Thor retaliated, getting angry in turn – “I have done nothing but spend my life wishing you could be as happy as you make me and yet nothing I do is enough for you. If I do not have your heart you should not have let me go all these years thinking otherwise.”

“Asshole,” Loki spat, eyes narrow – “I’m a good liar brother, but even I am not _that_ good. Not everything is about you, remember that.”

“Well apparently to you _nothing_ is about me!” Thor yelled, not trying to keep it down any more.

“Why are you making this harder? Why must you twist everything I say to make it against you?”

“I?” Thor roared – “ _I_ twist everything _you_ say? You have us the wrong way round Loki, it is you will not hear truth when it comes to close to you –”

“Enough –” Loki sighed, raising a hand, tired and arrogant, to cut him off – “Enough Thor.” He turned coldly and began to walk away down the lawn. Thor sighed and within seconds had followed him, taking his shoulder to make him stop;

“Loki –” he sighed – “Tell me what I can do.” Loki sighed back, looking down at the ground a minute before looking up to meet Thor’s eyes, seeing all the anger fled and only an infuriating neediness to help. Frustration choked in Loki’s chest like an illness.

“Thor – do you never think of being somewhere else than this?”

“No.” Thor shook his head – “home is home.”

Loki exhaled in deep measured sadness, knowing he would say something like this.

“And that’s why you can’t ever understand.” He looked away and continued with his back to Thor –

“Thor all I can see here, everywhere I turn – are ghosts of myself. Ghosts of you. I can see us running hand in hand through a thousand memories – so many versions of us throughout the years, so many years of being children here, of being happy, yes and in love too if you must – as you must know we should never have become. You don’t care –” he added quickly, seeing Thor open his mouth to protest – “You don’t care about that, neither do I. But the world cares Thor, however much you see to avoid it. We cannot have that time again and I am haunted by it, haunted by the shades of ourselves everywhere I turn here. And I see you, and I see you wanting only for me to be that child again and I cannot, I cannot be what you want me to be.”

“Loki I do not –” Loki turned then and put a finger to his lips, his eyes wet and silver in the light;

“Don’t lie,” he said flatly – “It is not so much of a fault in you but I am burdened down by my failure to be as you would have me.” Loki kissed him then, lightly on the cheek, almost apologetically and this time Thor watched him walk away wishing he had the words to tell him that - far as he was able to see – he was still wrong.

-x-

The arguments escalated beyond the two of them, to the point where Loki was fighting every day, not only with Thor but with their father too.

Odin could not see why, having returned home with no apparent intent to leave immediately again and do something he could not have personally imagined in the world of science, he refused so adamantly to be of any help in the family business. It was not even that the business was not an entirely legal one that bothered Loki, indeed his only main objection seemed to be that it bored him. Every time Odin asked him to do something it would escalate into a screaming that had always been there, waiting to happen between the two of them, but which only now found vent.

It all culminated one afternoon, their mother was sat at the table with Thor, the two of them keeping quietly out of it whilst Odin tried to persuade Loki to run a delivery out to the speakeasy in the valley.

“Don’t you start on that moral high ground with me, young man!”

“I _have_ the moral high ground! I’m not the one running a criminal operation!”

“It’s the criminal operation that’s paid for your entire life!”

“I didn’t ask for it! It’s vulgar, all of it, and these people you would have me deal with are more vulgar yet!”

“They’re the people you come from yourself you little –”

“Odin!” Frigga rose swiftly from the table, face pale, eyes wide with shock. Suddenly the whole house seemed to tremble in its silence. Loki went white as a sheet, staring between his parents as though punched.

“What?” he whispered, barely a breath of a word, failing to stop his lip from trembling.

“We weren’t supposed to tell you like this,” Frigga sighed, glaring furiously at her husband who went red and quiet beneath that glare.

“Tell. Me. What?” Loki hissed.

“We found you,” she said gently, simply – “where the mountain of ash meets the train track, we never knew how or why, we just knew that you were ours. You are ours Loki, our son as much as Thor –”

“No –” Loki breathed, but his voice wavered and it came out almost as a scream, the breath stuck in his chest, he shook his head and backed away as Frigga tried to approach – “No –” it began as denial but switched within seconds to a horrible understanding – “No – it all makes sense now – how you’ve always favoured Thor over me –” this to his father who would not meet his eye, then turning back to his mother – “You should have told me.”

“Loki –” she almost implored, making another step towards him – “It does not matter to –”

“ _It matters to me!”_ Loki shrieked, pushing her away, eyes almost red with fury – “You’re not my mother and I – I am a lie.”

Between her desperate silently pleading face and his father’s shame Loki could not stand it for another second; he bolted from the room. Thor stood to go after him but his father caught his arm –

“No Thor, let him go –”

“I will not! You – you have always looked at him strangely, made him feel second best – and he is not –” Thor stumbled for words, never having spoken back to his father in his life.

“He is not your brother Thor,” Odin said coldly, Thor glared at him, cold and hard as steel.

“Yes he is”.

He left the room to the sounds of his mother’s voice raised at her husband beyond anything he had ever heard or could imagine her doing.

-x-

Thor tore the house up looking for Loki. He was nowhere to be found, and Thor, the only one who knew him well enough, was terrified for him, but it was not until he checked the garage that he really truly panicked, blood running cold at what he found. He ran back to the house and, having no desire to speak to his father found his mother – who was not speaking to him either. Finding her all he could do was blurt out his terror and hope she understood –

“Mother – Loki’s gone – and he’s taken the car.”

__x__

**Now if you know the end of Gatsby you may have guessed a little where this is going, if you haven’t please hang in there it’s going to get bad, but unlike in Gatsby I promised a happy ending and a happy ending you shall have, it’s only maybe two/ three chapters away!**

**Meanwhile I am sorry sorry for the delay - I only just realised it's been over a month! - I was moving house. I has moved now. It is brilliant. :-)**


	21. Chapter 21

On his mother’s adamant insistence that he not rush off and potentially make anything worse by his hasty intervention Thor did nothing but keep inside and fret for the entirety of the evening. He paced the rooms, fists clenched until the muscles screamed, while his parents glared at one another in icy silence. He watched the day turn to dark outside the window and felt that dark terrorize his heart. He thought only of how Loki never looked where he was going when he was driving in the daylight – what chance did he ever have angry and at night? As if to mock his horrible gut wrenching sense of foreboding the rain began, hammering right on the edge of his fear and making it only always a hundred times worse.

In all of this it never once occurred to him to wonder if anything between them had changed in light of this ill-timed, ill-delivered announcement. He wanted Loki back more than ever because he knew they would have to talk about it, not wanting to repeat his mother’s mistake of assuming that because it made no change to him or to her it would be the same for Loki. He simply and only wanted to see his brother safe and beside him and to do all he could to make it better.

As the night wore on and Loki still did not reappear, Thor’s concerns that he was not alright turned into frantic burning certainties. At midnight he screamed at his father like the teenager he had never quite been at the time, when Odin told him to stop worrying and go to bed.

And then, for lack of knowing what else to do, he went to his room after all. Sleep was impossible, of course. He paced the room like a restless tiger, his heart horribly half expecting the relief of green light illuminating the window at any moment and his brain angrily stomping down upon that painful hope.

Nevertheless, he left the window open and was glad that he had when, at almost two in the morning a rock fell on the carpet with the scribbled note attached –

_Outside. Come down by the window._

Loki’s handwriting. He almost fell down the wall in his hurry, remembering with a jolt how Loki had always goaded him to try this and his implications that he would not manage.

His eyes searched the dark and he was sure that, even in the rain, anyone for miles around could have picked him out by his heartbeat. Then he saw it; a gentle green glow in the woods to the side of the lawn. He hurried through the shadows like a thief.

When he finally made Loki’s shape out amongst the other shadows his relief was so immense that at first he did not see the look on his face; the wide staring shock in his eyes, did not notice until he crushed him into his arms and felt him as stiff and motionless as a rock.

“Loki?” he whispered, not sure why he was whispering, why indeed all the secrecy but whispering by instinct all the same – “Loki what is it? What’s wrong?” Now, in the faint lights that penetrated down from the mansions into the woods he could make out the more than usual whiteness of Loki’s face, the faraway look in his eyes.

“Thor –” Loki said slowly, as though he was coming out of a dream, looking up to him with a slowly connecting stare – “Thor I didn’t mean to – it was an accident I swear – she ran out in front of me –”

“Loki –” Thor shook his head – “What are you talking about?”

Loki’s eyes reached for Thor, lights in this darkness in which he seemed so much to be drowning;

“I have killed someone –” having said it he quite startlingly laughed – “You always said I would –”

“What? Loki I don’t care – it was only you I worried for, nobody else –”

“I suspect the police will see it differently. Thor I didn’t even _stop._ I’d gone on too far before I even knew what happened, she just ran out into the street, Wilson’s wife – she –”

He took a deep breath, talking very fast –

“I dumped the car, on the other side of the ash heaps, and I buried it, I was walking back when I heard them talking – everyone was down in the valley – the police – and I saw Wilson on his own, he was muttering that he’d seen the car, that he only knew one person had a car like that. I followed him back to the garage, saw him taking out the gun and I – he was so easy to kill, I never guessed it would be so easy – I –” the frantic whisper bit off, Loki stared down at his hands that shook so even Thor could see. Thor crushed down any shook that he felt at what Loki ad told him and took the trembling hands in his own to still them.

“Loki – Loki it’s alright, it will be alright – if he was going to kill you –”

Loki gave a short bark of a laugh –

“Kill _me?_ Do you think it would have been so easy to do it to save myself? Thor he was going to kill _you._ It’s your car – or it was – ” he frowned – “I’m sorry –”

Thor snorted in disbelief –

“You’re sorry about _the car?_ Loki I don’t give a damn about it, I’ve told you. Just tell me what I can do.”

Loki nodded, he had thought this through the whole walk home in the rain –

“They’ll still come here, even with Wilson gone – well they won’t ever trace that – only a matter of time before the drunk fell down his own ladder and broke his neck – but they’ll find the car and come here and when they do I can’t be here. You’ll be fine – your father –” Thor winced at how bitterly Loki said those two words – “Will waste no time telling them it was me, and by then I’ll be gone – I think – I think I could be good at not being found.”

“Gone?” Thor echoed – “Gone where? For how long, what will you do?” Loki shook his head –

“I don’t know yet, I don’t – and it’s best you don’t either. Perhaps – perhaps this is even for the best.”

“For the best? Loki what will you do? And what will I do every day, wondering where you are?”

“It’s not your concern –”

“Not my concern? Loki you’re my brother and –”

“I’m _not_ your brother –” Loki spat, hissing, and though Thor had known he would say it, it hurt so much more than he had prepared himself for – “I’m not your anything –”

“Loki, you’re my _everything.”_ Loki looked at him dully, eyes narrowed somewhere between cruel and dead –

“Get a new everything,” he hissed, flatly – “I mean it, Thor. I spent my whole life afraid I was nothing- how many people get it proven to them that they really are?”

“Loki no – please –”

“Thor for god’s sake, don’t cry. Do you think I’d kill for you just so you could waste your life over me? You can have better, you always could.”

“I don’t _want_ better Loki, I just – let me come with you, I cannot just sit here and wait –”

“Then don’t wait. Because I won’t be coming back. Here –” Loki pushed something into Thor’s hand – “So you don’t spend every night watching the window.”

Thor looked down, saw Loki’s torch in his hand, the torch that he had had since Thor could remember. His heart tasted foul in his mouth and he shoved it into the pocket of the bag Loki carried with him when Loki would not take it back.

“If I do not have that hope –” he floundered, unaware even of who he would be without it.

“Fine” Loki sighed, almost snapped – “Much good may it do you.” He blinked furiously, so that even Thor could see what he was trying to do, trying to convince himself, trying to truly feel – “I have to go now.”

Thor reached out his arms but Loki backed away so intently that all he could do was curl a fierce hand around his neck, where he felt the imprint of his fingers must be burned in from years of stroking at that same spot.

“You _are_ my brother Loki, always, nothing even you can say will change that.” Loki sighed but he turned his face into Thor’s palm with the ghost of a kiss on his lips before he pulled himself away with a wrench.

He looked over his shoulder just once before Thor lost him to the shadow of the trees, and that look and that not quite kiss would have to be enough, Thor decided, to keep him going for as long as they had to.

-x-

 

**Poor Myrtle Wilson! Destined to do little more than run out in the road in front of a big yellow car in every possible universe! And now Loki’s gone forever….is he? Would there really be another chapter if he was? :-)**

 

 

 

 


	22. Chapter 22

In the early days, when every hour seemed like a year of waiting, it would have been impossible for Thor to imagine that now, eight years later in the autumn of ’39 he would still be waiting, watching the window every night for a light that never came.

In the daylight hours he could tell himself that it was useless waiting; that his brother was never coming back, that the light he was so certain he would see in those crazy-long night time minutes was never coming again. It was easier to resign himself to it on a dull everyday level that clearly, from the strange hope that began to pulse again every night, never quite touched his heart.

As the days turned into weeks and those weeks turned horrifically from months into years he felt himself slipping away. He was grateful for it, almost but not quite choosing to lose himself when the real danger was in the fear that it was Loki he could feel slipping away, a cold, late night dread that he would forget any inch of that face.

He could not permit himself to forget and so he tortured himself with memory, images of the past swimming up to him out of a darkness that persistently threatened to drag him down. Loki as a child falling in through his window, laughing beneath the covers as he bathed them both in green. Loki later, still beneath those covers, giggling in the giddy anticipation of those early kisses and breathless exploration. Loki’s face in the darkness of the trees. In the shadows of every glittering party. Loki in the midst of the light that he so despised, but so beautiful in every angle of that light, slipping through the golden current of the people and the fractured crystal light like a shimmering jewelled snake through the grass. Loki driving, raging, storming at the world, laughing at it all, always pretending while at the same time he cracked the surface off of the world to show it for all it really was. Loki, always Loki. Those green eyes flashing in laughter, in sarcasm, in rage, dazzling bitterness and seething amusement.

He remembered, every hour of every day he remembered ever moment they had spent together, remembered the touch and taste of him, the sound of his voice, the smell of his skin. It was a torture to himself that he could not possibly have lived without. He dived into these memories with no hope or intention of ever coming up.

And outwardly he drifted. He felt cut loose from everything else, though he never strayed from this one place. In the winter of ’35, with his father’s health declining, his parents left for the Riviera with no intention of imminent return, leaving him entirely alone in house stocked to breaking with memory. He wandered the place, only half there himself, feeling like a ghost whilst at the same time haunted by the ghosts of who they used to be. He could all but hear their voices echoing through these rooms and down by the sea he could hear them call to each other. In the winter he could hear their calls echo up the lawn on the frozen air and in September he felt the bitter sting of Loki’s troubled hatred of the season, it seemed all through the month that he followed those eyes as they turned from him in awkwardness and anger.

Once after the first year of drifting along in this manner he got a postcard from England. It read simply _Don’t worry, I’m alright._ Inspired by these four words he wrote reams back, pleading for more; more words, more anything, pleading for Loki to return- _Loki please come home, you haunt me when you’re gone._ So much more, written and discarded in angry frustration when he realised he had no address to send it to.

Occasional postcards over the next few years; always a different country, no pattern that he could make out, only ever a few words each time, more than one from England but this was the only consistency he could ever find in all the hours that he poured over these postcards, cards he guarded obsessively close over the years, pouring more meaning into each brief word than could ever have been intended.

And he watched every night, whether he quite meant to or not- he watched the window for the green light that never came. He wondered where Loki was, what he was doing at this time, if he was watching the same sky, thinking of the same things. If he too deconstructed ever moment of that last night they saw each other, taking it apart from every angle to see if there was a way in which it could have gone differently. If they could have stayed together. He wondered and dreaded, hoped and feared that Loki did or did not feel the loss like he did. He did not know which of these emotions - that took their turns on him – was worse. He spoke to Loki in his head every night, stretching and reaching for some feeling, some psychic link that never came.

And then, it was getting towards the end of the year, the end of a decade, it was the winter of ’39 and the mutterings that crossed the Atlantic from Europe worried him. He knew but hazily of what was going on and all it meant to him was fear for Loki’s safety. That night at the end of December, he stood out on the jetty looking out across the bay. He watched his breath on the icy air, and beyond his breath his eyes looked distantly and heavily for the light that never came.

It was the same as it had been for the last three thousand nights and more. He sighed in the chill, swung his coat over shoulders that sloped these days and turned slowly to trudge back up to the house. But this time he stopped in mid turn. He turned back. And with lips that seemed to have forgotten how he began indeed to smile as he saw, as though it were a dream, a bright, strange light blink out across the water, a green sparkling trick playing upon the waves.

-x-

**I very nearly was going to make this the end of this story folks, but my faithful muse and inspiration _prettypearlnecklace_ has convinced me I can’t do that to you all. So the beautiful reconciliation scene WILL be written and not just left up to your imaginations like I, in my evilness was gonna do. :-)**

 


	23. Chapter 23

 

“Loki.”

Thor had to swallow so hard he was afraid the word would not come out. He was surprised to hear his own voice, and steadier than he had thought he could. He had dreamed about this; imagined it for so long that now that it was here he could not quite believe himself to be awake. The little boat slid up against the jetty and Loki’s face came clear and pale out of the darkness. The same face that had haunted and delighted, tortured his dreams for so long – and yet not the same; there was an age there, a sadness in the eyes he wondered he had not noticed before- or was it new? He could have drowned in the time they had missed. But there, he pulled the boat up and smiled up out of the dark, the oily water and the faint lights illuminating his face and there it was, the same half crooked smile he had always known.

“Well?” he smirked, “don’t just stand there.”

Thor moved as if in a dream, tying the boat fast to the land; if not the same small boat Loki had so often taken his night jaunts in, then one very similar at least. He thought his fingers would tremble, his hand shake when Loki grasped it to haul himself up onto the wooden boards, his grip tighter than Thor remembered, his fingers soft and cold as snow in the frozen air, but he stood firm, Loki rising to face him, still smiling, not letting go of his hand quite straight away beyond the point he should have and smiling at him like he had only been gone a few days.

Silence. So many heartbeats roaring above the night time tide and their breath dancing together in the air; smoke spirals that moved quicker than they could to be joined back together.  Thor could feel his heart laugh with relief and joy and could not make words for all its shouting.

“So,” Loki said eventually, softly.

“Yes,” Thor replied, inanely he supposed, but it was the best he could do. He made a low laughing sound that was nothing really close to a laugh.

“You know I imagined this. I never stopped – I waited for this moment so long I – I practised it even, and now like a dull player I have forgotten my words.”

“Yes, I suppose I always was better in that department than you.”

Somehow, without Thor really seeing him move, Loki was standing just a little bit closer and his hand was back in his. It was with  flood of warmth that Thor remembered how he had always done that; he did not think he could have forgotten anything but these little things, so much more real and different in reality cast a golden haze of familiarity upon his heart that was sweeter than any memory could ever have been.

“Speak for me then,” Thor’s lips twitched in the first smile he felt tickling them in years.

“Hmmm,” Loki smiled, the old mischief flaring briefly back in his eyes – “No”.

It had to be real. Thor’s mind told him at first it had to be a dream when Loki kissed him, he had been dreaming this for so long. But on first touch he knew that was unfair; it felt so awkward and wonderful all at once it could only be real. He barely moved his mouth like a sensible person, just crushed Loki close, holding tight and twisting, his heart exploding to gather all of that warm reality to him again.

“Thor –” Loki croaked eventually, breaking away a little – “Thor – crushing – breathing – becoming an issue.”

Thor let go slowly and shook his head –

“I’m so sorry.”

“For what?”

“I forgot. I turned you into a dream, fixed all of myself, my world upon you, I made you a symbol and forgot – how you really felt – who you were – I won’t do it again, brother.”

For the first time Loki looked away, looked down uncomfortably.

“Can I call you that?”

“You know it isn’t true?”

“No. And I never will.”

Loki sighed.

“And tell me –” Thor went on – “Tell me honestly - for once Loki please – am I not your brother?”

Loki rolled his eyes, shook his head in a sigh –

“I spent all this time – asking myself those questions and you ask like the answer would be simple. I’ve been everywhere, seen things and I –”

“Loki stop. Just answer yes or no.”

Loki almost glared in reply, as though being forced to speak plainly, honestly, with no way of wriggling out, offended him deeply –

“Yes then, damn you, there you are – yes. You are. You always were.”

“And you’re back? To stay? I have to know.”

“Well I couldn’t very well stay in Europe could I? Haven’t you heard?”

“Oh I see. It had nothing to do with anything else?”

“Well I also got that letter you wrote me that your – oh fine that _our_ parents were gone.”

“And that’s all?”

“Shut up Thor.”

“I’ve missed you.”

Somehow the phrase is desperately out of tune with the depth of the missing he had felt, and with the words belittling those feelings so too those feelings seemed to shrink, dropping away like the years that fell behind them now like dead leaves.

“Yeah. I thought you would. And I –”

“Yes Loki?” Thor grinned.

Loki blinked rapidly –

“Seriously, Thor shut up.”

“Let’s go up to the house. Your hands are freezing.”                  

“The house, yeah,” Loki nodded, more to himself than anyone else – “Ready for that”.

“We don’t have to – yet.”

“No it’s fine. Come on.”

Thor had just started to move away when Loki took his hand again, making him stay.

“Thor –” Loki said quietly and when Thor looked at his wide eyes and slightly trembling lip Loki was six years old again and Thor, for all he felt for Loki’s fear, could not help the surge of joy to see that his brother was still in there, always would be and indeed, had never been so far away after all –

“This war – you me – everything – will we be okay?”

Thor smiled slowly, nodded, curled his hand in a rough clasp around the back of Loki’s neck.

“Yeah,” he said – “Yes Loki, I think we will.”

They took hands again and walked up the lawn towards the house. There was still so much to say, so much past to be sifted through, but that was all. They would look over it tomorrow like a pile of papers to be then filed away. For now the stars were out and the night was clear, there was time to be made up for and they meant to make it up with vigour.

And tomorrow and tomorrow waited with arms outstretched. At the top of the drive Loki handed Thor his torch with a wry smile and Thor, returning his smile, dropped it behind them in the grass, knowing he would not need to look out for the green light again.

__THE END_

 

**It’s been a long ride, thank you all for taking it with me!** **I was aiming for happy and pleasant without too much sentiment so I hope I hit that! Also I’m feeling really proud right now cause I have major concentration issues that usually prevent me writing long pieces and this is actively the longest thing I’ve ever successfully written and finished! So yay me!**

**For anyone who fears they’ll miss my Thor and Loki after this – not to fear, I have a new AU planned and almost plotted! Rock star Thor/ Glam rock Loki AU called “We Could Be Heroes” coming soon! :-)**


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